It’s About Time… isn’t it!?
Yes, that would be a comment I am sure more than a few of you would scream at me. S-CARS.ORG appeared to be flat-lining, on a decline much like the U.S. economy. What WAS left of it was quite the mess thanks to a messy relocation from one server to another. It was a rough stretch I tell ya!
Quite some time ago I had been diligently working on an all new version of the web site. In fact, it was originally my intent to debut the site on the 10th anniversary of it’s creation. Well, numerous tech issues prevented that from happening. The site actually went through two evolutions in private before what you see here was released to the public. I really wanted the new site to be less cluttered than what we had before, and that led to lots of experimentation. In fact, two versions of the site were developed using a Joomla back-end but both wound up being a bit more complex than I wanted the site to be. What to do?
Well, during my down-time I happened to create a little test site for one of my other interests, Panasonic Bicycles. During one weekend of boredom and experimentation with WordPress I created the basis for the Panasonic Bicycles Virtual Museum which can be seen here. Before I knew it, the site had gotten to be more popular than I could have imagined (especially considering Panasonic hasn’t sold bikes here in North America since 1989.)
The beauty of the new site besides the fact that it was suddenly starting to match the S-CARS.ORG web site in terms of traffic, was that it was so easy to manage. Heck, I could even update it from my iPhone in a matter of minutes. It was simple and it worked.
The only problem was that I doubted it would be robust enough to handle all of the content that comprised what was S-CARS.ORG. And to be honest, as I write this I am still in the process of moving content from our old PostNuke based content management system to this new site, so we may still crash and burn yet! With a little luck and some organizational planning I think we’ll be able to make it happen though.
Now the cool part! In the past it was tricky for our other site editors to deal with the publishing of content. PostNuke didn’t exactly have a WYSIWYG editor so you had to be at least a little savvy with HTML. Our new platform will allow just about ANY S or RS nut to easily publish stories, blogs, etc. to the web site. Yes, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Top Gear may have The Stig, but we’ve got something even more perplexing… some say it comes from a warehouse deep within the forests of Bavaria where century old Trolls feast on it like flies to compost. All we know is that they are the S-CARS Site Editorial Crew! Stay tuned for the official introductions soon!
Thanks for hanging in there… and it was indeed about time!
Darin Nederhoff
Founder & Managing Editor, S-CARS.ORG
