Re: NEW Website Feature

Posted by BH On 2008/10/4 14:26:25

Thanks to all for your kind comments.

Most of the "heavy lifting" took place long ago; acquiring a complete set of photocopies, followed by some (though not all) of the original pieces, transpired over the course of many years. In more recent years, when I had the necessary hardware and software, I began toying around with composing the "missing" index pages for the 1956 SCs and STBs, emulating the factory's original style, but that work never got the finishing touches.

You see, the missing pieces of the Studebaker puzzle came to the surface. After I finished indexing and cross-referencing the SSB articles and saw what had happened with the latest edition of the 1955-56 SC reprints, I realized that a more comprehensive, single index was needed. Though these publications may not hold the final answer to all questions, there's a lot to be learned from all this material.

First composed as a table in MS-Word, I cut-n-pasted that index into a hand-coded HTML document for the web. While there was some talk about having links to actual scans of documents back then, I sure didn't have time or all of the original pieces to do so. Of course, that was before PackardInfo.

With the advent of this well-constructed site came a great influx of donations of original material. I'd talked with BigKev about hosting my V8 index page, but he wanted something more dynamic. Then, when people started asking for just such a reference, and not only for the V8s, we got down to the brass tacks. Yet, as much as it would be nice to make this purely user-driven, a path needed to be laid - hopefully one that others might follow.

As such, starting out with the 1955-56 stuff was a no-brainer, but it took a lot of clean-up work after converting a Word table to an Excel spreadsheet (our choice for a mass upload, rather than manually entering over 350 references). I also found and corrected enough typos in my original work, but added some new entries (and thanks to HH56 for that fine piece on lubricating the WSW motor). Then, after creating the entries that BigKev's kung-fu programming would translate into hyperlinks to actual documents, I took time to audit the table, line-by-line, as best I could. Then, it took a couple of test uploads of smaller files and implementing some changes based on what we learned from our mistakes, plus a final inspection, before we could go live.

Still, I wouldn't be surprised if I missed something; please let me know if I did.

Meanwhile, to work backward in time, into the PreWar era, I had to figure out how to connect the dots between SCs, STBs and supplemental service publications, and tried to explain the connection in an introductory piece for the new feature.

So, please be patient for the index for 1951-1954 cars. That one will take a bit longer, as I'll be working from scratch, but it will be just as good. Then, we'll be wrestling with how to parse the earlier years and series for the next index after that, and we may be asking for help with the research.

However, what's presently archived here begins to come up short as we move back in time. Hopefully, scans of earlier shop manuals and bulletins will come in by then, but it's going to take people with more knowledge than me to create indices for the PreWar cars.

It is truly amazing what can be accomplished today, thanks to the Internet and people who are willing to share the time, talent, and information that they have.

So, thanks also to all who have contributed to the best of all websites for Packard enthusiasts around the world!