I know most of you are not exactly shy about commenting at CC. But is there anything else you’d like to say, suggest or ask? Things in general you like or don’t like, or you’d like to see? Or more specifics? Got a brilliant idea for us, a pet peeve or just want to know how many cc a Saab 92 engine has? Perry and I (and the rest of the gang) are all ears, so if you’ve been wanting to get something off your chest, or stump us or entertain us, step right up.
Not sure if you ever considered this, especially since I’m a fairly new follower of your site. What about putting a link to Facebook, so we can like you on Facebook?
Other than that, I don’t have any suggestions. I think the best part of the stories on Curbside Classics are the photos.
Keep up the good work!!!
Good point. CC has a Facebook page, but it hasn’t been maintained in a while. There’s potential for growth if it received a little more attention.
I’ll have to talk with Paul and Ed to see what their thoughts are… but for my part, I don’t think it’d be a big deal to add Like buttons for the site and each post therein, and automatic updates on Facebook when new posts are added.
We used to have a FB link on our main menu bar here, next to the Cohort. But why would someone want to get there from here? But we could add it again.
But yes, it turns out that unbeknownst to me, the CC FB page was not getting updated content for a very long time. I mentioned that to Perry, and thought it had been updated. But just going there now, it seems not.
I don’t do FB, but I’m sure someone here can figure out why the CC feed isn’t being updated on our page there.
I follow the CC page on FB. At one time you setup an automated tool that cross-posted a notification to FB when a new article was posted here. That is useful for drawing traffic here because it was easy to “like” articles, and then friends of that person would see them.
Then the notification tool broke. I pointed it out and it got fixed, but only worked briefly. I gave up hounding about it.
Looks like it’s fixed again!
The hell with Facebook.
+1, personally speaking. But we like to accommodate everyone 🙂
I’m no Facebook fanatic myself, but with so many people out there that are, it’s tough to pass up the free publicity it offers.
Thanks to a bit of work by Perry this evening, CC’s Facebook page will now be updated with each new post that appears, and each post now has a variety of sharing-related buttons after its conclusion. One more request fulfilled!
+1. I have no need to live out loud or on stage.
Comment of the week.
Not really a big FB defender, but it does have it’s utility.
Like some here, I have family all over North America and Central Europe; the easiest way to stay in touch with them is FB. Sometimes it’s like I’m actually there.
OTOH, there are a lot of folks who plaster whatever crap comes to mind on it, but that’s the nature of a public forum. Not much you can do about it.
We use FB for the soccer league I help manage, it’s great free publicity and a good communication tool to our target audience (females 20-45). We use other social media tools, also, but FB is our main interface with our customers.
That said, I think I’ve only ever visited the CC FB page once… Ha!
I agree – while I don’t love Facebook that much, it does have its use as a means of communication.
A downside with FB I can see is that parallel conversations and comments can appear there. This happens on some other sites and can be annoying (plus it leads to little cliques). Although I’m a big FBer, I love that the CC website is where everything happens. It’d feel fragmented to me if anything other than links to new posts was going on the CC FB page.
Agreed. I get e-mail notifications about comments left there, but I’m not going to switch over there to respond and such.
First and foremost, keep up the good work. I really enjoy the growing number of writers. Though they’re each different I appreciate that they all love their subjects, not the attention.
As far as article ideas: when I travel across the US, I am always fascinated by how different the daily drivers are in various places. Here in SoCal, if I count the cars in a parking lot, they would be 60% Japanese makes, 25% European (read: Gernan), and maybe 15% American. (Not talking about factories here, just corporate ownership (though ChryslerFiat obviously confuses things somewhat)). The Northeast is similar, with a slightly hiogher proportion of Subarus and Saabs.
But when I visit rural Illinois (Ontario) I see almost exactly the opposite, probably 60% American (largely minvans), 25% Asian, 15% or less European. The DFW Metroplex is probably closer to 33/33/33, with a heavy bias towards large SUVs. Rural Oklahoma is very heavy on American pickups. You get the idea…
Maybe it would be interesting to send a few of us out on assignment as it were, to photograph a typical parking lot, or maybe a school drop-off (to capture those all important soccer moms driving tomorrow’s CCs). Might make an interesting comparison.
Also, I did send an article yesterday, to your personal email Paul (which I had from our previous exchange about the Scenicruiser Cohort pictures). Just want to make sure it didn’t get spam trapped for having an attachment…
Got it! It usually takes a few days to get e-mail post put together and up. But I should have sent you a reply telling you we got it. Perry and I are still working out details like that.
Great. I hope you like it.
C
I just want to extend great compliments to you Paul (with Perry and your contributors), for creating and running such an awesome site. Very professional, entertaining, and informative all at once. You really do work hard and take pride in your baby, and it shows, with many satisfied customers. A model blog, that encourages positive, constructive communication.
I think your site is a perfect example of what’s great about the Internet. And how powerful and beneficial the Net can be, as a learning and interactive tool.
Easily one of my favorite sites, and I recommend it to friends, when I can.
+1, other than one minor nit…
Not “one of” my favorite sites. IS my favorite site! 🙂
Broughamly, the App.
There are two types of App; those that save your life and those that waste your time. For a select few, this will save their life. For the rest of us, it’s a fun time-waster.
Keep it simple; this only needs to be about 10-15 pages. Take Carmine’s list and source pic examples from your massive archive. Between me and Daniel M. (Sorry dude, I keep volunteering you for things. I use CS daily incl PS with scant retouching skills, but I can help to prepare assets) we prepare up the skins.
I’m not on facebook either, but its too good a marketing tool for you to ignore. Prepare the app and push it out to every single car enthusiast facebook page in the world. Big numbers there. Big return numbers possible.
All we need is a theatre. And someone’s 14 year old nephew to do the smartphone coding.
Failing that, how about a history of the Countach bedroom poster.
Agreed! It’s a great idea. (maybe “Brougham-O-Meter”?) I wish I was 30 years younger, so I felt more at home with these things, technically. So yes, if anyone can help, I would love to see this happen.
“Brougham-O-Meter”
You just gave me an idea for a future Junkyard Outtake 🙂
Now, to build myself a (fake yet photogenic) measurement instrument! Wonder where that broken yellow Geiger counter is…?
Boop….boop….boop
WHONK! WHONK! WHONK!
Yup, that’s pretty much the idea!
Ha! How about an AR app? (Augmented reality). Aim your phone camera at a car and it automatically draws on a vinyl roof and landau bar….
You could have a donk version (puts 22″ wheels on the car) or lowrider version (makes it jump), or (my favorite) the Daddy Roth version that adds a big, bloodshot – eyed monster with a 4 foot Hurst shifter.
Seriously, not a lot stranger than some of the AR apps available for your phone/tablet.
Coder is a major bottle neck. Anyone know anyone?
What you want is a student — possibly even somebody’s high school kid who wants to be a programmer. App coding is not enormously difficult if you’re not doing something complicated or that requires interacting with some kind of secure account-based data (as banking apps do) and making and selling an actual app looks good on a college application or a new college grad’s resume.
If he wasn’t so busy with schoolwork I’d volunteer my son. Maybe when the school year is done and he finishes his Eagle Scout project…
@C. I’m serious, but I’m also patient. When does your son’s school year end?
Paul, there is enough enthusiasm to warrant more work. I will prepare a top-line for you and Perry to consider, and have it in submissions within 48 hrs. If you feel it is credible, perhaps you will pass it onto to C or anyone else who puts their hand up. Cheers, Don
How about Broughamify, wherein an app can photoshop any car into a Brougham? Anyways, whatever the app(s) is/are named, I will buy it/them.
You beat me to it (see abovel
The bedroom Countach poster idea is a good one!
+1! (I still have mine from the 1986 New Zealand motor show)
What I would love to see (and would use if I had a device it would run on and if the terms of service didn’t make me cringe) would be an app to let you look up old cars based on VIN or other data, with a picture library and so forth. Basically, an app to let you figure out what that interesting old car on the street or in the car show actually is to a reasonable degree of certainty.
I totally agree. Much longer lasting, but aggregating that info takes venture capital money.
The real holy grail app would recognize the car visually and then take you to the corresponding CC! (or an AUWM article 🙂 )
Paul, if you want shape-matching software, just go to your local FBI office and find out who the creators of the software are, get a license to use a modified version for the Holy Grail app, buy the software, have the software get coded into the app by whomever you can find, and finally, sell the app at $15.00 a copy initially and lower the price incrementally based on how many copies are sold. It’s simple, really.
I bin thinking about that. I wouldn’t charge, I would do this at no cost and just distribute. See Live and Let Die for a fuller explanation.
Having said that, I’m offering to do the artwork prep. I would need someone to source pics from CC (Carmine, get off your ass. This was your idea in the first place). Daniel can do a better logo than me, but I’ll be carrying most of that pre-code weight.
I’ll do it even if only 18 people want it. But I need a coder.
This sort of money should be spent your server. App or no app, I think growth for CC is inevitable.
Don, did you notice the idea to get the software was very Rube Goldberg-esque?
Paul & Don, I’d be happy to submit any potential graphical requirements you might require. I work as a designer. Just state your needs. And I can submit concepts.
Something like our carjam that gives you all the car details from its registration number?
Yes, like Bryce said, NZ has that with our carjam site. http://www.carjam.co.nz/ As an example, go to that address and type in BYY901, the registration number of my old Nissan Skyline that I owned from 2004 to 2010. You’ll see loads of interesting details and a photo of the actual car (anyone can upload photos). To see more in-depth details (eg for a specific car that you’re looking at) a full report may be bought. Because my Skyline was a JDM used import and not NZ-new there’s no info on model variations; but for NZ-new cars you can see all the different spec levels that were available as well as the prices of the different variants – eg type in ESE717, my old Mazda6.
Don, I sent you a private e-mail. Did you get it?
Perhaps a posting on best selling cars from the 1980’s and 1990’s that sold thousands and yet are hard to find in the wild now. For example the 86-91 Mercury Sable. This was a car that sold in the thousands and yet when is the last time you saw one?
Or a CC on the current Ford Fiesta? We have a posting for the current Focus but no post on the Fiesta
That is a good observation. I do have a ’90 or ’91 Sable captured.
If we’re talking Fords of Recent Yore, there’s the little-missed Probe. My first new car was a (second-gen) ’93 Probe GT, which was my pride and joy for few weeks–until things started going horribly wrong. The exhaust system broke in half and fell off the car about six weeks in. It ate alternators and went through brakes like candy. I nonetheless managed to keep it running, at great expense, until 100K, and then foisted it off on some teenager at a fire-sale price.
Parts were surprisingly dear for a domestic, which perhaps explains the Probe’s low preservation rate. When was the last time you saw one of either generation in the wild?
Excellent site, Paul and Perry. Though I’ve commented only a couple of times, I visit almost daily. Keep up the great work. If there’s a CC reunion in Indiana this summer, I’ll drive my ’79 Seville down from Detroit and show everyone a true Deadly Sin. BYO8T (Bring Your Own 8-Tracks).
We had a 1990 Sable bought new! I have a fair number of photos (nearly all taken in old-school fashion on 35mm color print film). So they’d have to be scanned.
This was undoubtedly the nicest-looking car my wife or I owned. I’d say the reason you don’t see them anymore is that they were so unreliable, especially their transmissions and the head-gasket eating 3.8-liter V6. We had the Vulcan 3.0, but weren’t so lucky with the tranny (or the a/c, tie rod ends, front struts, alternators, water pumps, ad nauseum).
Yet, it was so pretty, in currant red, with those lovely (but hard to clean) lace alloy wheels…
First off, thanks for maintaining the first site I usually visit every morning.
I know it’s been posted before, but do you have the breakdown of commenters by country?
And while it may not be possible to get a breakdown by region, I’ve always been impressed by how well represented all areas of the US seem to be.
Only a fairly modest percentage of readers actually comment. The image attached shows what countries CC readers came from, by the number of visits from those countries in the past 30 days.
Where can I find statistics like this for CC?
You can’t 🙂 It’s from Google Analytics, which is not available publicly. But if you have a specific request, I can get it for you.
I would like to check the demographics of my Citroen CX article.
I’d like to see the Eugene IP contingent. I average a few visits a day at least.
Holy shit 1500 odd Kiwis visited that explains people who recognize their cars leaving comments on Flikka.
Actually, that’s “Visits”, not “Unique Visitors” so you’re probably responsible for 90% of them 🙂
Thanks, Paul!
There are some surprises on this list. Indonesia being at #13 a major surprise. So is Turkey at #22; perhaps I can much of the credit for my article on the dolmus. 🙂
Just under one third of viewership is non-US. This site is taking it transatlantic.
I get a more or less similar result, although most of the non-U.S. traffic is from Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, for fairly obvious reasons.
English language is the key thing, but the scope of this and yours is global. How much growth have you seen from a) non-US and b) non-English speaking? For me the truly international flavour of CC seems to lift it above partisan lines.
I’d have to puzzle over the analytics data — I’ve never pondered that question too closely. As far as I recall, the percentage of non-U.S. traffic has remained fairly consistent and looking at the growth pattern in general, I’m assuming there’s a percentage of non-U.S., English-speaking readers who regularly read U.S. automotive websites and come via referrals there, rather than any particularly unique overseas growth. I don’t know about CC, but I imagine it’s similar.
International visits have grown somewhat faster than overall growth, but not by a really huge factor. Two years ago, the percentage of visits from the US and Canada was 79%; now it’s 76%.
Do those statistics account for the effects of IP masking software? I can see that skewing the results otherwise.
I have seen CC write quite a few articles about the American car culture of Sweden. But one element you have left out is “pilsnerbil”. These are mostly 40s-80′s US cars, typically four-door Chevrolets and other similar GM cars with an exaggeratedly beaten appearance (similar to the look of the Trailer Park Boys’ shitmobile). They are typically primer painted, have junky looking interiors, mismatched wheels, graffitied slogans, hastily applied customizations, and duct tape repairs, but are mechanically well maintained. Drivers cruise and blast music while their passengers drink booze (legal over there). This seems like a confusing Swedish take on rat rods with a hint of bozosoku added. If Robert Kim, or anyone else who has seen the classics of Sweden knows about them or would be interested in looking for any and writing an article, that would be interesting. This is the one regional car (sub)culture from another part of the world which I have not yet seen documented in English.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGDHKkpyS9Y
another example
I’m quite sure Ingvar, our man in Sweden, has commented about this. But a proper post seems very worthy!
Fantastic! Like a parallel universe. Slowriders with a Swedish accent. Loved the music too.
I completely missed out on this phenomenon while I was in Sweden. I spent 90% of my time in Stockholm, which most likely explains why I did not seen any of these cars, which I assume are more common in smaller cities and towns. I will have to defer to Ingvar on this one!
Råt Rød.
He he he +1
Ouch! Kind of makes you a bit more concerned when a classic leaves the U.S.
Looks like deliberate damage…
Does pilsnerbil mean beermobile?
No improvements necessary, Paul. Just please add a “Login” button at the top of the screen, instead of scrolling way down to search for it.
Seconded!
Thirded!
Wait, is that not a word?
(cut co commercial break)
I love this site! Thank you for all the articles.
I’d like to echo those same comments. Will also share that I’ve seen a Merkur on the road in the past week. A very nice original first gen Ford Tempo 2-door was parked next to me when I ran to the store a few hours ago. On the way home, spotted a mid-eighties Camaro, white in color with highly oxidized paint appearing as surface rust, being driven. Have also seen a few other decent looking GM sedan CCs being driven at night. Anyway, what I meant to say is that I see at least a couple different CCs when I’m out and about almost every day. What seems hard for me to accept is that cars from the early nineties are now twenty years old.! The original Neon came out in early 1994 as a 1995 model, and I still see first gen Neons almost every day. Almost all of them still appear to be in good shape.
Either many folks – as a result of the economy, perhaps – can’t afford a new car, or they just like their old car which is still running just fine.
Watch the video below (a commercial for Magnum ice cream that ran a few years ago):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHDs_8zVDm0
1) What’s the black car visible at 0:20, right in front of the police cruiser? This has been bothering me since I saw this commercial when it first ran on TV. I’m pretty sure it’s not an American car. Its styling strikes me as GM-looking, which made me think it might be a Holden, Opel or Vauxhall, but I haven’t been able to find a match.
2) Anyone know (or care to guess) where this was filmed? It appears to me that some of the cars visible in the commercial are familiar on North American roads, including some older vehicles, while others aren’t.
Watch the video below (a music video by a synth band from Cambridge, MA):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U-Ul5qnLeQ
Any guesses as to the identity of the “highly decorated” car visible in a few different places in the video, most clearly at 0:23 and 2:40? It looks to me like a large American car from the ’60s or early ’70s, but I’ll bet someone here can narrow it down further. Fuselage era full-size Chrysler product, maybe?
1. It’s a GM A-body sedan made between 68 and 72; very much American.
2. No idea.
3. Looks like an early ’70s Mopar.
1) The roof is A-body four door sedan, but the front clip is strange and looks stretched.
2) No idea either.
3) From the grille center and the location of the parking lights I think it might be a ’71-’72 Galaxie/LTD.
The first time I saw #1 on TV, I thought it was a Chevrolet Chevelle, but after watching the commercial a few more times, I was less sure, and after looking at it more closely on youtube, even less so. Something about it didn’t look quite right to me; the shape of the rear side window seemed wrong. I thought it resembled a 1968-72 North American GM A-body (hence my thought that it was some kind of GM product), but I didn’t think it actually was one. I had been thinking it was a two-door, though. I can’t make out the rear door on the side view of the car, but the rear side window does look more like a 1968-72 A-body four-door than a 1968-72 A-body two-door.
As for #3, I can definitely see 1971-72 full-size Ford as a strong possibility.
It looks like it’s been customized, with the rear door “eliminated”, to look like a two door. I’ve seen that on other cars. And the front end does look a bit long, but that may well be the lens.
There little doubt that it was shot in Mexico, or some other Latin American country. Several cars and trucks are models sold only south of our border.
I’m certain that this is a Buick Skylark, a 4 door sedan version, circa 71-72. Think “GSX” , subtract spoiler, and add two move doors w/ posts! 🙂
1. The tail lamp view at 0:17 looks a lot like a ’69 Acadian Beaumont, the Canadian Chevelle.
2. I’ll go with Paul on this one.
3. I’ll go with Stumack, and add that the roof sail panel looks like a two door version.
Interesting theory on #1, as it would explain why the car kind of looks like a Chevelle/U.S. A-body, but not quite.
I just realized there’s a shot of what may be the same car, from a different angle, around 0:55-0:56. It’s in a different place in the traffic jam from the car at 0:20, but they may have moved the cars around in between filming different portions of the final commercial.
As with Zackman, I’d love a ‘log-in’ button at the top of the page. Other than that it’s pretty much perfect! 🙂
Agree. The current log in function is quite cryptic – hitting a “Register” button, switching the field to “log-in”, then clicking something to the left to get the visit site button.
Also, pat head, rub stomach and turn around three times! 😉
I recently discovered there’s also a log-in button on the front page but it’s buried near the bottom of the right-hand side menu:
That’s the one I use…
Well, I’ll be…..
Learn something new every day. But, I know the Double Super Secret way in!
Still a bit unusual that it lands you in your profile and not the most intuitive to new users to have to hit the “Curbside Classic” button on the top right to get a drop down to “Visit Site.”
Thanks for the tip!
Let me find out how difficult that would be, or not. I get why you ask 🙂
Woo-hoo! New log-in button right up the top! Love your work Paul! 🙂
Thank Perry (I assume). I’m a bit of klutz when it come to the techie stuff.
Perry: if ’twas you who popped the log-in at the top, you’re a scholar and a gentleman, thank you!
I love this site! I check it at least once an hour. I especially do love the COAL series and the junkyard visits.
What ever happened to that new theme, which was used briefly then abandoned? With the old server gone, maybe it deserves another look… might add a little more polish to the site’s appearance.
I kinda like the patina here.
Thanks for reminding me, the new server is Brilliant!
I like the patina too. Understated, like a shadow wiki on all the things the real wiki doesn’t show.
Yes, the new server works! The old one made visiting here a painful experience sometimes. Thanks, Paul, for all your work here.
It totally crashed the old server, I don’t know why.
We could revisit it, although I’d have to think about some aspects of it. It might be better to start over sometime again, and spend a bit more time mulling it over. That was a rush job because it was (falsely) thought to be the solution to our tech problems.
Any thoughts on doing classifieds as a side-page or some such? Jerry and I chatted about this recently after you posted his (and now your!) LTD for sale.
FWIW, Hooniverse tried it, and I’ve seen only two ads, one of which has been up since the summer of 2012! It’s hard to compete with craigslist.
But that’s them. And we could try it.
I could see uses for a classified section here.
Could be a good way to draw attention to certain kinds of cars which are loved by the readership, but not as sought after by the general public. If such a thing had existed back when I owned, say, that Monaco, perhaps selling it might not have been such a struggle.
(The only question is – are any readers willing to put their money into actually owning a Curbside Classic of their own, or would they rather stick to reading and daydreaming about them? I can hear it already… “love seeing the old cars, but I’d never go back to one”)
As for Hooniverse: I see the two sites being different in that, where Hooniverse is more general, CC tends to be associated more with certain genres of cars. That could prove useful here. (I also suspect their demographics skew a bit, dare I say it, younger. It’s hard to wax nostalgic about your first car when you’re still driving it.)
Plus, think of all the money you’ll make once you corner the market nationwide on such things as RWD sedans and Broughams of various flavors 😀
Paul, could it be named “Curbside Classifieds”?
nice!
I belong to a boating website (way too political). But, they do have a boat for sale function and the site owner takes in a little income from it.
Awful hard to improve on what you have now, Paul. The research and accuracy of the articles you and the other contributors write is amazing. No BS like so many other sites (which will remain unnamed), especially political. One idea I have is a readers Curbside Classic page or whatever it would be called for people who have owned one car for many years or/and many miles. Curbside Clunker?
+1
I would suggest that they just send us the pictures and a bit of a write-up. We’ve done them before here: “My Curbside Classic”.
Or do you mean something different?
Perhaps a posting asking readers to discuss a vehicle they own that they still drive that they have had for many years and many miles? Could be some interesting stories. I owned a 1970 Chevy c10 for 30 years and still drive a 1986 Jetta with 295k and have had since 1991.
Good idea. We’ll do it.
Cool. Thanks!
Just keep on keepin’ on. There’s any number of sites out there which cover the ultra-desirable (and unattainably overpriced) classic muscle cars. Not too many who seek out the actual mass market cars which most people actually bought back then.
Everybody remembers the GTOs and the RoadRunners. Not too many people know about the Tempests/Belvederes.
Just want to say that I always enjoy this website. I may not comment as much on some posts, but that does not mean I don’t enjoy them – I may simply not be able to add much. I enjoyed the recent pieces on the ’36 Ford school bus and the Brady cars, but didn’t have much to add.
The cohort lacks any discernible structure. It appears to be a string of 12,000 photos on flicker. A bit unwieldy. I don’t know what would be possible. Something indexed by day, brand? I don’t view it very often as it is.
That’s because it is a flickr page and flickr totally screwed up their format with a “new and improved” version some time ago. It was new but it certainly isn’t an improvement. Nothing we on CC can do about that, sadly.
Can I sign out of yahoo? I joined the cohort but couldn’t find any sign out button.
The only thing that can be done is to use the search bar, and search by “this group”. But that only works if folks have put captions on their photos. It’s unruly, to say the least.
I’m not sure what else we could do. If anyone has suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.
Prayer? Flickr users are, from what I can tell, widely if not uniformly annoyed by the cumbersome interface, but despite continuing complaints, Flickr’s new owners (Yahoo) have shown no signs of budging. It took me an hour of swearing and an email to tech support to figure out where they buried the controls to manipulate your own photos and the “infinite loading” scheme will crash my browser if its results are too broad.
When pictures are posted in articles or comments it would be nice if you could click on them and they would get really BIG. As it is now they usually stay the same size or even get smaller! It would show off the wonderful patina of the old cars and make it possible to read the print in old ads and brochures that get posted from time to time.
With our new server, we have increased our max upload size to 1200 pixels, which pretty large. I’m not sure all the Contributors are taking advantage of that yet, and some pictures may not warrant it, if the quality isn’t up to snuff.
“Getting smaller if clicked” Never seen that, and I’m not sure why that would happen. Can you find an example?
Right off hand the only one I could find getting smaller was Keith’s ERCOA (not picking on you Keith, I love your Junk yard and frozen Minnesota post as an ex-Minnesotan.) pontoon boat, not by much but I’ve seen others that go down to half size, I suppose it’s what ever the original picture’s size was it reverts to. This is for sure just a suggestion not a criticism.
They’re not smaller; the same size. It just looks smaller with the black surrounding it.
You mean the catalog cover? When I clicked on it, my browser (Chrome) presented me with the full-size image, but it scaled it to fit within my window – thus making it appear smaller. Clicking on the image once more caused it to zoom to full size.
If that’s not it, let me know so I can look into it. Can’t have shrinking pictures around here!
Personally, I still find myself resizing everything I post before uploading. 608px wide seems to be the limit before things go over the edge of the content area.
I’d like to upload larger pics and let WordPress take care of scaling them down, but its default resizes seem to go straight from “way too small” to “a little too big”. And dropping into the non-WYSIWYG editor to set each picture’s dimensions (as I used to do) is just too much work.
I upload at either 950 or 1200 pixels. With 950 reduced to 60% by the Image Editor, the final image is always just right. With a 1200, I have to go 60% and then 80%; and the final result is then just right. No need to even check in preview. It took a bit of trial and error to figure that out.
800/825 reduced to 70% works well too.
When you download your pictures to the server is the “click it” imagine size set automatically or do you have to set that manually. Maybe some of the contributors are setting the size too small? Also I may not know what I’m talking about.
The “click-it” size is what is uploaded to CC, and we currently have an automatic maximum limit of 1200 pixels on that, to not load our server too heavily. 1200 is a pretty decent size.
But many of us were uploading at smaller sizes because the old server was over-worked. But 800-950 should be the minimum, and I’m good with all images loading at 1200. Server capacity and memory are only going to improve over time. A few years back (in 2007-2008) we were limited to 450 pixels at TTAC, and very few images per post. But I started breaking through those limits when I started doing CCs there, and I caught some flak for it.
I just had one of those “aha” moments. I was looking at the properties of Keith’s pontoon picture, after clicking on it, and it said it was 585 x 770 pixels and then noticed that there was a “+” sign where my cursor should be and then after reclicking it got slightly bigger and then the properties read 608 x 800 pixels and the picture was back up to it’s original size. Not long ago I upgraded Internet Explorer to version 11 and it had as one of it’s improvements an automatic enlargement feature added to it. So these times that I thought the picture wasn’t large enough it was because I hadn’t done a second click on the picture, Never mind.
Good to know. I’ve got some 60 pics in the hopper for this week(!), so it looks like I’ll have a chance to do some testing.
We had played with newer themes a while back that automatically size the photo to fit the content column… My personal site does this, and it’s much easier to add photos because of it.
Paul, a long, LONG time ago I promised you I’d get photos of the next L-series Mercedes-Benz truck I came across. Last summer I saw three… friggen THREE of them, two of which were Brazilian-built models (and all of which were moving trucks) but in each instance, they were flying past me and I couldn’t get my phone out in time. I did get the name off of one of them, looked up the company and found the truck sitting in a yard in Brooklyn via Google Street View, so if I have no luck spotting another on the street, I’ll try tracking it down on foot at some point.
I also promised long ago that I’d start contributing articles to CC and while I know I’ve contributed exactly zilch (and feel so shitty about it), I did take that promise at least somewhat seriously and have accumulated in excess of 1,200 photos of cars, trucks, buses, etc. When I first started, I wanted to wait to come across something that really struck my fancy to write up… but then the pictures just kept stacking up and now I’m getting hung up on having so many that I don’t really know where to start. Should I just pick at random and fire away? They’re not the best pictures, because they’re all taken from an old Blackberry while I’m at work, but most of the cars are pretty interesting.
In specific relation to truck week, I’ve also got some (American-built) Mercedes-Benz LP pictures – is that anything interesting or worth featuring here? I could do it myself, but it would be full of more BSing than those vehicles probably deserve. I figure they’re, at the very least, part of an interesting history of M-B trucks. Anybody want em?
Sean: I understand; the hunt is the most exciting part. I have thousands of cars shot and not yet written up.
My recommendation(s): do the most recent find, and while the glow of finding it is still fresh.
Or: whichever car turns you on the most.
Or: Pick one randomly, and just decide that’s the one.
it’s sort of a variation of writer’s block. It’s easier to shoot, and keep shooting. But I promise you that once you just sit down and write a few sentences, it will flow. You’re a gifted writer; we’ve seen that here already. Just don’t set any particular expectation or hurdle for yourself. Not every CC has to be brilliant or a masterpiece. But the key is to just do it…
I’m not saying this to prod you, but if you want to write, you have to just…write. It’s a form of self-discipline as well as self-acceptance.
What about a posting of one photo each of 5 or 10 cars and letting the commenters decide which one to feature? The poster could then post all of the photos that they have of that car, either as a full write-up or without accompanying text and let the commenters fill in the details. I think this has been done here a couple of times before but it would be nice to see it as a regular (once a week or even once a month) feature. That would make for fewer cars lingering in the photo vaults. Could be done with “My CCs” as well.
Here is one to kick things off!
I have an uncle who knows that I love classic cars, and has owned his share. But he thinks that I’m nuts for among other things, having a soft spot for late 70s-80’s full-size RWD and similar American cars such as B/C/D bodies, G-bodies, and box Panthers. When I have pointed them out or discussed them, he has colloquially called them “turds” or “clunkers” and said they were boring/ugly looking/all look the same, were built badly, had no performance, and there is no reason for me to find them intriguing. I have always thought the opposite about these cars. They we’re plainly styled compared to their predecessors but had a certain unique elegance, presence and proportion. The build quality had faults but they were still built like tanks and to this day thousands and thousands continue to take a beating and go miles and miles. To me the last generation of true American “chrome & steel”. What he sees as an aging junker (no matter what shape it’s in), I see as a grand, solid, reliable, and comfortable Detroit land yacht. Nothing against him, I guess one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but do any of you have someone in your life who finds it odd that you favor a particular car or type of cars?
Yes. And my tastes are pretty tame by CC standards 🙂
Most of my vehicles have “clicked” for friends and family when they first saw them. But a few of my buys over the years (the Olds 98, pretty much any 4-door without a big V8, and especially the 2-for-1 Saab 900s) have drawn puzzled looks and/or laughter.
I know you’re probably constrained by with wordpress template that you’re using, but I’d like to see the “clues” posts handled differently.
I enjoy reading the clues and seeing the guesses and I become quite curious about which (if any) guess is correct. However it seems that the posts disappear as soon as they complete car is posted and I often forget which clue went with which new CC.
Ideally the clue posts would persist indefinitely and would have a clearly visible “state”: unsolved or solved. With the answer being present somewhere, but not immediately visible.
This would allow people to peruse old clues for the fun of seeing if they could guess the answer as well as letting lurkers like me revisit the solved posts to see which poster was correct.
We got in the habit of pushing them back a few days to maximize the front page real estate. With our new server, we have upped that to 15 posts, so we really don’t have to do that anymore.
If I understand you correctly, the correct answer to the Clue would somehow be accessible, right? That might get a bit complicated. How about we just leave the Clues where they originally were posted, which is usually pretty close to the car it relates to? It would be easy enough to figure out then.
I’m wondering whether there is a revenue opportunity for CC in posting links to cars for sale (cars of the CC variety of course). Maybe a craigslist link from each CC posting to cars similar to those being profiled, sorted by location (Looking for a Panther in Lake Wobegon? Click here!). Or just a general marketplace for people to advertise their cars. With CC’s increasing profile, could it become a national go-to place for finding certain types of vehicles?
I don’t know how we readily we could do the cl links, and how we’d get paid for them. But a classifieds section is worth exploring.
Is there a way to put “home” or “return to top” button at the bottom of the comments page?
+1
Let me add that to the list of changes to consider. I’m sure there’s a way; the question is only how easy.
You might consider trying to add the link as a footer to the article section; there are plugins for that purpose. That would give you the same functional result in a less-painful way. (You can add links to the top of the comment section, but it’s a hassle unless you’re willing to hack the template files in a way that’s generally not prudent.)
+1
There are few things in my life that don’t need improvements and this is one of them. In my experiences, change usually ends up being for the worse.
+1
I’ve actually found myself thinking how CC is mostly perfect how it is. There’s always changes that could be made but I love the format, the comments, the people in it and how it’s about the cars and the history, never getting too political or hostile. It’s seriously the best community I’ve encountered on the Internet, let alone a car one. It’s special how us with an admiration for the normal cars (not just the poster worthy ones) can convene and just talk and argue passively about them and learn while doing it.
Keep up the good work Paul and all the other writers!
Hopefully one day I can finally make an entry of my own but in the meantime, I’ll keep learning from y’all.
I’m for increased readership, as its needed for survival, but I’d be wary of people who “don’t get it” coming and ruining it.
Agreed. CC’s commentariat has been consistently excellent in staying on-topic and not getting overtly flamey. It’s a damn miracle of the internet, I say. Also Paul’s (and whomever elses) moderation plays a role in keeping things friendly and welcoming. It’s really something.
I don’t know what to say. I love COAL, I love that you let your readers contribute, I love that rare or old cars are found simply roaming the streets, I love that we indulge in a nostalgia for cars that by today’s standards are unreliable death traps.
I hate that we sometimes get political and seem unwilling to let us have our silly passions. Trashing each other for liking Panthers or B-bodys or W-bodys or 70s GM cars or pick up trucks or BIG trucks (like this week) or hell even those appliances with Toyota badges on them.
Things seem more likely to get political or heated here when the discussion is about newer cars.
Dan – I think you should do a COAL series on your cars. It does not matter if you’ve owned four or forty, if they were old or new, it works either way. The longer you’ve had a car the better the story is, it does not have to be longer, just pick out the experiences that stand out the MOST relative to that car.
You’re one of the most regular commenters and I think I have a good idea of what your automotive history consists of (since I see your comments here and the other place) but it’d be interesting if you had some old shots to dig out and write about.
Overall I wouldn’t change a thing. I have a poorly developed thought about a new feature. I really enjoy those Motor Trend Classic reviews where they test drive an old car and write about it. Even better is when it’s a comparison test. There’s a great one on their channel of the BMW M3 vs. Mercedes 190E 2.3-16 by Jason Camissa. The one on the Cosworth Vega vs. Capri II was also very well done.
Not sure how something like that would work here or if it’s a good idea. But it would sure be interesting to hear another POV about my own car if I gave it to someone to drive. What do they notice, good or bad, that I don’t?
Another thing I’ve grown to like are videos of cars for sale where I can hear the engine. If you do the road test thing it would be nice to have some audio in the “review”.
Or a “trading places” piece where two guys swap rides and talk about it. Or a best CC for under $5,000 where guys enter their cars.
Probably unworkable what with the insurance and production issues to contend with but the folks here would do an even better job than the old car buff books.
Shoot, I want to go and hire a Rent-A-Wreck for a week and drive it around and then write about it. In the early 90’s I was in Seattle and rented an old Tempo and it was a horrible experience (but it got me where I was going).
I’ll be in Iceland for a few days this summer and am looking at car rentals (prices are insane!), there are a few outfits that rent older cars for less money, we may go that route. If so, I will for sure write about that. A “temporary” perspective on an older car would be interesting. Just test-driving a used car from a lot would be too short I think, needs to be a few days or few hundred miles at least.
And since you offered, the next time I am in your neck of the woods, I would be honored to take your ride for a spin… 🙂
I would suggest adding an HTML sitemap or sitemaps. Yoast.com (website of the fellow who does a number of useful WordPress SEO plugins) has a tutorial on how to create one — I was able to figure it out, so it can’t be that difficult — and you can with a little study apply that to create different partial sitemaps as index pages. (I’ve been considering changing my manufacturer/era indices to sitemaps so that there are two fewer things for me to forget to do manually.)
I’m assuming you already have some kind of XML sitemap generator for search engines, but having an HTML sitemap is really very handy both for users and for contributors; I use it all the time when I’m setting up internal links in new articles or adding redirects to deal with remaining 404 errors resulting from the migration. An HTML sitemap isn’t for search engines — the page itself should be set to noindex, follow — but lets human users get at any piece of public content in a click or two without having to use the search function.
I’m a big fan of index pages in part because with a blog-format website, new readers may not immediately grasp how much content you’ve actually got or think to search for stuff you have in which they might be interested.
The indexes seem to be an ongoing issue. Seems like someone (Paul) always has to update them by hand.
I suggested linking the various buttons (“American Brands: GM” and so on) to WordPress’s automatically generated category indexes. That might have worked, but I didn’t realize that the post categories don’t quite correspond with the buttons in all cases.
If the posts were categorized in the correct fashion, it’d be fairly trivial to get the index pages to work however they need to. But we’re talking about thousands of posts needing to be dealt with.
There’s got to be a better way of handling it, but so far no one has really dug in and found it (AFAIK).
A series of emails was going around recently about cleaning up the categories. I didn’t follow it closely, but perhaps a plan could be laid out which improves both situations at the same time.
If you create a partial sitemap, you can set the parameters in a variety of ways — for instance, you can make a partial sitemap that will pull all of the post data with a specific category or categories (or all but particular categories) and automatically generate lists displaying whatever information you want from it — title, author, date, excerpt, etc. (What I’ve done as a prelude to possibly automating more of the index pages is use the post excerpt field as a subject field.) Once you see the basic principle, adjusting it to different purposes isn’t terribly difficult.
Also, with an HTML sitemap, you can generate sorted lists, whereas clicking on a WordPress category link basically just filters the front page view. That’s okay, but it’s not the same thing.
Cleaning up taxonomies is a PITA, no argument, especially if you already have a lot of content, but I’m of a mind that an annoying one-time chore that reduces the new-post workload later (fewer things to forget to do, as I said) is generally still worthwhile.
There’s a WP plugin that can automagically reassign post categories… I had played around with it on a local copy of the site and it seemed to work as expected. The bigger challenge would be deciding what categories to winnow down to!
Is there any advantage for a nearly daily reader and occasional commenter like myself to register?
Maybe only in that it might be quicker to comment? But probably not really, otherwise.
And you get to have a cool personalized avatar show up next to all of your comments. 🙂
I for one would like to see more Cohort related posts, maybe on weekends.
I’m working on right now. Part of it (on my part) is finding something that speaks to me. If you find you like, give it a try!(no cinquecentos, though. Hint)
It would be nice if icons of similar cars would appear at the bottom of a post like on BaT (“related stories”). Also I like polls but only if there are enough voters.
I enjoy this site very much. One thing I like most about it is the diversity of cars and people.
Curbside classic is updating on facebook so thats working the Loadstar post just showed up.
Paul,
I think you’ve hit the sweet spot when it comes to the vehicles that you cover – passenger cars, trucks, commercial vehicles, professional cars, “big rigs” like this week – it’s always a superb mix of all things automotive – and not a day has gone by in the two years I’ve been reading that I didn’t find something truly interesting……..
Said it before but bears saying again – basically keep at it! The site is a real joy as it is.
I’ve a handful of thoughts and suggestions, all minor things:
– WP login –
WordPress “forgets” me periodically (even when I’ve clicked “stay logged in”) and the process to log back in from an article you’ve been moved to comment on is a PITA: through the “register” link, then change it to login, then you’re taken to an account admin page from where you have to dig through history to find the article you were actually planning to comment on. Could someone look at the backend and either stop it forgetting users, or make the process of re-logging in smoother?
– author guidelines –
I mentioned this indirectly in a comment to one of Perry’s articles recently: sometimes a brilliant article is littered with unlabelled images of other cars, mentioned in the article but not identified. For us overseas readers it can be hard fathoming which image relates to which car, I suspect the same’s true in reverse for US readers when an article on Euro models is peppered with unlabelled comparisons.
Happily the commentariat (in this case JPC) is always there to come to the rescue but it made me wonder, what about a simple set of author guidelines? Comb the archive for “best practice” on things like image labelling, (maybe also conventions on listing bhp? vehicle weights and dimensions? formatting?) and supply it as a quick “guide to contributing” PDF either downloadable somewhere on the site, or sent out when someone volunteers to contribute.
– IFTTT driven notification system –
Someone’s already mentioned FaceBook integration and it’s been partially shot down… I’m not a booker of faces myself but plenty of folk are, similarly there are those of us who use Twitter. It seems to me that the clever gubbins at ifttt.com offers a simple low-maintenance way of connecting CC with the wider social networking world while retaining its unique identity and under-one-roof commenting community. I’m imagining an opt-in FaceBook link, and/or Twitter feed that uses IFTTT to automagically notify those of us in those social spheres when there’s new content here at CC, with a link back to the mothership as it were.
WP login: It does that to me, too. Seems like every WordPress site does that to me, every few weeks. I always just assumed it was cookies expiring or some such.
Best practices: There are already established practices for various things, but I don’t recall anything about formatting of vehicle weights, outputs, etc.
IFTTT: Not familiar with that, will have to look at it. (Facebook automatic updates are now up and running; Twitter wasn’t discussed – is there much demand for CC tweets?)
I’d follow CC on twitter, even if CC only posted links to new articles.
Generally, standard text cookies expire in about 30 days unless you manually delete them first. There are ways around that, but more persistent cookies aren’t necessarily a good idea, particularly if the U.S. decides to follow the E.U., which is mandating that websites make any type of tracking cookie an opt-in thing (where you have to click on something saying you agree to the use of cookies) for privacy reasons.
Unless Paul and crew decide to create member-specific features at some point, there isn’t any particular reason you need to log in unless you’re a contributor. If you comment once just using your name and email, most browsers will remember that info and auto-fill it the next time you visit unless you have the browser set specifically not to do that or make a point of clearing your stored form data on a regular basis.
splateagle: IFTTT supports RSS Feeds as a channel. Curbside Classic has an RSS feed for new articles posted. (RSS is how I usually check for new articles here.)
You should be able to setup your own IFTTT recipe to send you a tweet whenever there is a new CC article. No need for any changes on the site itself. 🙂
Thanks for the tip!
Ban that Philhawk guy.
For those CC readers out there who have not written up an article for posting, but have been sitting on the sidelines thinking about it……is there a user friendly format for instructions on doing so? If so I can’t find them. But then I am not tech savvy either..
But what that means is, that if I can’t find it, there are probably lots of others out there in CC reader land that can’t either! Now having said that, if the process is explained in CC somewhere, then my apologies in advance.
What page do you go to start a post and how to post photos…etc etc…not all of us have the computer skills to navigate our way around this process. But I am willing to bet that lots more folks might take keyboard in hand and do so if the process was “dumbed” down a bit.
On the header bar there is heading for Submissions and another one for Contact…both bring up the same format. Is one supposed to use the contact and ask for permission to write an article? And then what? What is the ‘submissions’ heading for? Are the articles edited? And what of the different headings under which to post an article, like COAL, Outtake, CC Capsule,CC Classic? How does one know where their post will be written under?
Sorry for asking the seemingly obvious, but someone once said, “There are no stupid questions.” and…”if you ask a question it makes you look stupid for 5 minutes – but if you don’t ask – you stay stupid for fifty years, so always ask questions in your life”.
So if you could please explain it to me, that would be great, thanks.
Glen, these are all terrific questions. I’ll try my best to step you through this based upon my experiences.
The banners up top do take you to the same place. If you would like to contribute, email Paul at the address seen. He can determine access needed at that time.
All the labeling is done within the context of Word Press. For instance, let’s say I start an article on a Holden, Buick, Fiat, or whatever. There is a checkbox within the backend of the site so it can categorized correctly; so if I want something long, it could be a CC. If I’m not so enthusastic about the car, it could be a capsule. There are an abundance of categories.
Pictures: As a creature of habit I’m still scaling mine back to 800 dpi (although when I first started, I wasn’t scaling them back and they were HUGE!). Pictures are uploaded to the library and then chosen for insertion. Needing a picture of a newer Lincoln a while back, I could see where Tom Klockau had loaded a picture of his, so I chose it for insertion into what I was doing. It’s pretty simple. One can then preview the post as it will appear online, which for me is quite helpful in proofreading.
Don’t let unfamiliarity stop you. It was on a complete spur of the moment I sent Paul an email two years ago. I’ve lost count of the articles I have posted. My previous writing experience consisted of persuasive emails and personnel reprimands. If you have the passion for something, writing about it isn’t that difficult. Editing is done on many pieces, but it’s fairly painless and you are given time to review.
If you have thought about it, do it!
There is a guide, which is sent out after you’ve been “promoted” from Subscriber to Contributor. It explains all those things, and more.
If you want to get set up, contact Paul (or Perry, pretty sure he could work with you on that too).
This does provide an opportunity for one more suggestion: People often ask about the definitions of various CC-specific terms and acronyms (what’s a COAL? what’s the difference between a Capsule and an Outtake?). The writer’s guide defines all these terms, but I’m not sure they can be found in one place elsewhere. Perhaps a page could be dedicated to giving all those definitions?
Could also be a good opportunity to nail down some other things which have yet to be established, but seem to have taken hold on their own.
For instance, “Junkyard Outtake” is a specific kind of post, which typically runs at a certain time of week and follows a particular format. “Junkyard Classics”, on the other hand, is used more like the CC Outtake; a looser category which can contain anything found in a junkyard. (Yet both use the “Junkyard” category…)
+1 on a CC Glossary. Besides the CC-specific terms, other terms commonly used here such as Di-Noc, maiaise era, Brougham, Colonnade, Clamshell, Bangle/Banglebutt, etc. would be pretty useful and not take up a whole lot of space.
Personally, I’d like to see a list of all the Wxxx Mercedes models & what the heck they apply to. I wouldn’t know a W112 from a W114 and a simple Google search didn’t yield anything.
I would like to be set up as a contributor when the days will be longer and I’m able to resume my weekly scrapyard visits. Those technically don’t fall under the “Junkyard” category since this particular place doesn’t officially sell parts off their victims.
+1 on the W-code ID for Mercedes!
That’s something I’d like to do….and will!
See, if you append “Mercedes” to your query (e.g., “Mercedes W112”), a web search will generally answer those questions pretty quickly.
That’s nice Captain Obvious, but I don’t know what all the W-designations are to begin with and I’ve spent enough time trying to find some sort of chart that lists them all.
Since you seem to think it’s cake, how about post them yourself and save others the trouble?
I wasn’t intending to be snarky. I have trouble remembering all of them myself and have to do what I suggested doing on a regular basis.
This isn’t a Mercedes-specific thing; a lot of enthusiasts and historians refer to chassis codes as a way of identifying a specific generation of long-running models. I don’t think many people can keep them all straight in their heads — I certainly can’t — especially when the manufacturer assigns different codes to each variation of a particular model. (Toyota, for example, uses an alphanumeric code where the first letter or two is the engine family, followed by the model identifier, the generation number, and a number for different chassis variations, usually by engine displacement but occasionally indicating something like steel versus air springs.)
Some of your questions have been answered, I see. Yes, the Submission form should have more information; it’s another project waiting for some extra time…
I’m going to do a post on Submissions, with some general information.
If you’d like me to send you the Writer’s Guide, I’d be happy to.
I just like to use this opportunity to point out that Jerry Seinfeld thingie on the Super Bowll, especially the use of the AMC Pacer so soon after AMC Week. Do you think Jerry is either a lurker or a commentor using a different name? 😉
And what’s the deal with Broughams??
Agree with others, the site is great as it is, any of the changes suggested by me or others would just be a bonus. One more that I would like to hear more about is the gatherings, the possibility of having one in Indiana was mentioned about a month ago and then faded away.
I think a post to have commenters suggest locations for gatherings and then have each area broken down into a separate post would be helpful. I for one would be interested in something in Indiana or thereabouts, as I am in Michigan and could do it as a day trip. It would be a great excuse to finally get my ’86 Caprice Brougham on the road too!
CC Meet-ups are a bit of a challenge to organize, given the logistics and such. I have committed to come to Indiana, but no date has been set yet. I’m thinking either late spring or early fall, or?
If someone wants to organize a regional gathering, I’d certainly be happy to run a post on it.
Personally speaking, early fall would be better than late spring due to a high school graduation and kids moving back from college, all of which promises to keep me fairly occupied. By Labor Day, everyone is back out of the house and I will have more free time.
That’s my preference too. I have happy memories of fall in Brown County!
Indeed, many of us IU grads do as well. Plus airfare and hotel prices are generally lower and the weather there is often quite nice in early fall, with less humidity – one aspect of southern Indiana I don’t miss.
@Cresys, I am planning on a CC meet-up at the Chrysler museum for the CEMA show on June 4. Would that be a good time for a meet up?
CEMA? Chrysler Employee Racing Association? I think you meant to say June 7.
http://www.cemaclub.org/2014cemashow/2014Flyer.pdf
I was thinking I’d try to finally make it to the Fleetwood Country Cruize-In in London, Ontario that weekend.
http://fleetwoodcountrycruizein.com/
Oops, I meant to type Chrysler Employee Motorsport Association, not Racing Association. Otherwise the acronym doesn’t work. 🙂
Mr. Edward, that’s a great museum, would love to have an excuse to go there again. Of course in Michigan, there’s lots to choose from! I particularly enjoy the Gilmore Car Museum near Kalamazoo (http://www.gilmorecarmuseum.org/), a farm setting with over a half dozen restored barns filled with cars.
D*mn it! Completely forgot about that one!
Simply put, CC is the FIRST blog I look at from the office. Used to be another car site which is now relegated to history; then off to BaT and Hemmings for quirk-seek. I have a couple for local history, but they serve a narrower readership other than BigApple ex pats.
I got hooked on CC especially after being hired by an independent OEM (recognize my avatar, anyone) which unfortunately went by the boards though the IP was purchased by a FE firm, so the car should be renamed the Phoenix (without any issues of spontaneous combustion, thankfully). Now I have OEM bus and coach clients. All these interests plus my own orphan-lust keep me coming back here daily.
Thank you, Paul & Co., for enriching my day. Now if I could just figure out how to un-block some of the attachments and get them past my firewalls…
No complaints from this satisfied customer. No big brainwaves for improvement(s), either. Other than to establish CC Open Mike Day as an annual occurrence every Feb. 4. Twice-yearly might be better still. Or every 3000 miles, whichever comes first.
How about having an open-mike day on a quarterly basis (once every three months)?
I don’t know if WordPress allows it and maybe I’m not seeing it in action already here – could we add the capability to “like” or upvote/downvote an article or a comment?
Popularity contests aside, this could maybe generate a “Greatest Hits” collection of articles.
That’s a controversial issue we’re going to steer clear of. There’s pros and cons, but the cons win. The negative aspects of voting are too obvious. Everyone who writes or comments here is a winner! 🙂
You’re a wise man, Mr. Niedermyer.
+1. I stopped in to see what the response would be to that suggestion. One of the things I appreciate about this forum is that it is free of meters that record # of posts, likes, and such. I think these additions just clutter up the discussion and undermine the democratic philosophy apparent in Paul’s response.
Makes sense. Glad I’m a winner 🙂
For “Big Rig Week”, I hope to see some Kenworths and Ford C-Series.
I don’t think Kenworth made it this go-around, but there’s a Ford C Series post in the archives we could run again, if we have any space left: https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-american/curbside-classic-the-almost-immortal-ford-c-series/
How about a story on the Chrysler Imperial Lamborghini Edition…has anyone else read “Icons and Idiots” by Bob Lutz? He talks about building it in the chapter on Lee Iacocca(pages135-136). I’ve tried to find out what happened to the car, even tried to contact Mr. Lutz through Road and Track magazine (askbob@roadandtrack.com). Someone, somewhere, knows what happened to this car- maybe a retired Chrysler employee.If the car survives, it has to be one of the most valuable front drive Mopars.Perhaps someone with more computer skills than me could do a photoshop image of the car. What do you think?
I haven’t read the book, but are you sure Lutz wasn’t just being sarcastic? After all, it sounds like a logical (?) successor to the Chrysler Maserati TC.
The following comment is based strictly upon my personal tastes, so I may very well be the only reader for what I’m about to suggest.
That being said, I’m a bit of a road geek and wouldn’t mind seeing some histories of various roads, highways, freeways, etc. that may have some sort of interest or historical merit. US 66 has been done to death, of course, but there are many others.
Feel free to ignore this idea — it surely won’t do much for the Alexa ranking. It’s just a matter of personal interest.
All of us here write about what interests us, and what we think will interest others too. If we were just thinking about our rankings, we’d have a lot more Top-10 posts and exotic car crashes and such.
We’ve had a number of posts about highways, although most were more like travelogues than histories of the highways themselves. But it’s a good subject. Maybe someone will take it up. Maybe you’d like to give it a shot?
Yeah, I sort of did that with my Highway 50/83 Tercel writeup (and I think you did a Hwy 50 article as well) but mine was mostly influenced by real-life circumstances, with the car and avenue springboards for writing. It’s a good subject, though, and if Pch101 writes any articles I’ll certainly read them.
Something like U.S. Rt. 40, Old National Highway. Unless that has already been done.
Au contraire, mon frère. I think this is a good suggestion. I live close to the Pony Express route in Utah. Only problem-lots of dead horses but not a whole lot of Mustangs. Worth working on though.
I’m curious about the big encyclopedias of cars some of you have. The ones that say how many ’56 DeSotos with Hemis were built or what’s the wheelbase and rear track of a pre-war Morgan. A post or two about the best books would be most interesting. Then I’ll know what to look for in the used book stores.
I have the “Standard Catalog of 50’s Chryslers”, but my dad borrowed it shortly after I got it (and hasn’t returned it in over 2 years) so I can’t comment on how detailed it is. There was also a more general book “Standard Catalog of Chryslers 1914-2000” which was out of print for a long time but they released an updated version in 2012. I have yet to pick that one up. There are similar tomes for the other manufacturers as well.
For a general all-brands book, I have the “Ultimate Car Spotters Guide 1946-1969”. Most of the pictures are clipped out from brochures. The author has made hand-written notes to point out year-specific details, list prices and other trivia. I see the same author now has an updated version, “Monstrous American Car Spotter’s Guide 1920-1980”. It still only has black and white pictures unfortunately.
A lot of times I just meander around the internet until I find something. Looking back, I am wishing I had done a better job of maintaining bookmarks or an index of these sources that I have come across.
I enjoy it immensely here,Informative and entertaining.
Wasn’t there talk a while back about a new logo? I noticed TTAC has a new one now. I should find that old post about the logos, because I know there was a lot of discussion about pros and cons, but as a professional graphic designer, I think it would be a nice enhancement. I could also help, although my time is extremely limited these days.
Paul, its like this: Im an insatiable hoon who loves cars. AND I love useless info about obscure cars. I soak up info about them like a sponge, and yet Im stuck in an office working for a bank. So between my daily ‘suicide tank’ 3 cup vat of iced black coffee and my daily dose of CC goodness this site makes my day cruise by smooth. Youre a bit like a crack dealer to my gear head. Since finding this site back in Dec, Im hooked. And its not just you, there are some fantastic writers on here with lots of great comments. The COAL series is one of my favorites since Ive always said cars have stories. I like hearing them.
That said, I believe someone suggested a classifieds section. You have the makes sectioned off, and the COAL sectioned off. CC classifieds would be a good move. Whether theyre caught in the ‘wild’ or on autotrader, or craigslist or if someone is selling it themselves, I think putting cars and buyers together is a good move. I say that from experience, as Im not one to own your everyday cammacord and when I do get in the market, I usually want the ‘good’ version of that ride. My PT Cruiser was a GT manual with H.O. turbo. My Ram is a RumbleBee. Specific is my middle name, and I know Im not alone.
The other observation is the ‘capsules’. Are those lumped in with the ‘regular’ CC entries by make, or do you have those on the timeline? Do they eventually all get sorted out?
I’ve noticed a couple of things about the classified ad sections of model-specific forums.
Even on forums that are very active the classified ad section can be surprisingly dead. I don’t know why that is. Maybe sellers figure the forum folks will see it on CL and eBay anyway so why not just list there. Or maybe there is some reluctance to sell to your online friends.
As for the readers re-posting ads they see on CL or wherever be careful what you wish for. That thread was started on Turbobricks some time ago and is now the most popular thread on the entire site!
I love reading it but have mixed feelings. Sometimes I think it drives up the competition for nice cars. I suppose if you did it at CC there would be enough variety of makes/models that it wouldn’t matter.
Lots of good suggestions here. But if you did nothing I’d still be a faithful reader and wouldn’t expect you to change a thing.