An observation on how new feature car people find TWF.com

The April 2010 issue of Mustang Monthly has an article in the Late Model Corral that mentions this site. It is a very nice mention that provide a good overview of the site. It does state that, at first glance, the site seems oriented toward 1993 cars. But, it’s not, and they quickly conclude that. I’ve explored that topic in the past and see no reason to revisit an identity change. But, it is an interesting observation from outside of our “feature car” centric world.

In looking at how search results get people to this site I have always felt rather good that the top search results that get people here always involve “triple white fox” or some variation. I feel that I was the first person to put those terms together back in 2002 in order to describe my car so its interesting to see how popular it has become.

February 2010 TWF web stats

But, taking a slightly different view of these numbers, we see that there are no search terms related to 1992 that got people here during February 2010 the month from which they stats come. That is typical of most months where, at most, there are a few search results related to 1992.

Now search results are not really representative of who visits here regularly. You existing members link directly here so we don’t see that in the search results. And, some of our most active and enthusiastic members come from the 1992 crowd.  But, I think I can conclude that there is more work to do to get this site out there and noticed. A mention in Mustang Monthly certainly helps!

The forums are down

Several of you have emailed me to inform me that the forums are down. Thank you.

I have been working on getting them back up. I have a situation that I cannot resolve on my own and am awaiting help from my web hosting provider.

I have to admit that the reason they are down is my own pilot error. During some housecleaning, I mistakenly removed some files critical to their function. But, so far my efforts to restore them have not been entirely successful.

I should be able to get it almost all back except for a few posts. It you are into these technology things then you know how small problems cascade into larger ones. For some unknown reason, my site backup started to fail on March 2, 2010. Not a big deal, I thought, because I have never had to use it. So, I temporarily turned it off. But that successful March 1, 2010 backup, although it has everything I mistakenly deleted, seems to be missing some other important files. Files I do not have the permissions to recreate. After I restored from that backup which was an all or nothing affair, the forums won’t come up. I think it is due to those missing files.

I did do a manual forum data backup on March 10, 2010. So, once the forums are back online I can restore the posts back to the evening of March 10, 2010. I think there were only a couple posts after that time.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I will provide an update as soon as I have made progress.