A Big Thank You to Eric703, Who Labors Behind the Scenes to Keep Our Ever-Growing Archives Current

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– Posted on April 28, 2018

I’ve been feeling a lot of gratitude lately about CC. We are privileged to have a wide range of contributors here, some of whom create content worthy of the finest books. That is anything but typical for an automotive blog in this day and age. And we continue to welcome new ones, as you’ll see on Monday morning. But keeping all of this constantly-growing body of content archived, so it’s readily accessible to visitors as well as ourselves, is a big job, but there is one among who us has been quietly doing it for some time. And it’s time to give him some overdue recognition.

Our archives, on the right side of our site, are not generated automatically. When I started CC, it was not possible for me to imagine just how big the site and its contents would grow, and so I didn’t even try to categorize all the content in a way to generate automatic archives. And even if I had, they would have been limited, as it wouldn’t have been possible to archive them all in the way we do, by manufacturer, brand as well as chronologically and by various geographic areas. Plus, we’ve created new archive categories as we’ve continued to grow, and will continue to do so. A Canadian archive is long overdue. Have any other suggestions?

That means the process of creating a new archive entry and link is strictly manual, and is a rather tedious undertaking. Sometime last year, after falling way behind, long-time CC contributor Eric703 volunteered to bring them current, and he continues to do so. In a way, it’s a bit of a waste of his talent, as Eric’s CCs are consistently some of the best here, always deeply researched with excellent presentation, like his most recent one on a ’66 Valiant. Maybe there’s someone else out there who is very detail-oriented that might like to also help out in this most worthy effort?

There’s so many other people to thank here at CC, I don’t know quite where to start. CC has grown into something very special, thanks to all the voices here from both contributors and commenters.

When I was a kid, I was a fanatic about automotive statistics, and I started cutting out these stat sheets from every Road & Track magazine review and put them in a three ring binder, organized alphabetically. This was going to be my handy life-long reference library for whenever I got into a debate about 0-60 times, weight, and such details with others. I saw statistics as the key to winning every automotive debate. Due to my ADD and lack of discipline at the time, what was going to be my personal archive of critical automotive stats never grew beyond the first dozen or so, and the binder got tossed by my mom sometime after I left home.

By the time I started writing about cars ten years ago, I realized that there’s so much more about cars than the stats that are essential to put them into proper context, especially since the focus was primarily the cars of the past. Most of all, the personal experiences of folks who had owned all these cars, as well as the other more subjective and contextual content that really brought them to life, including analysis of their design, technology, social, economic and political considerations, all contributed vitally to gaining a much more complete insight. That’s where you all come in.

So while I once might have envied the folks who compile nothing but automotive stats, like automobile-catalog.com, a superb reference for our work here, I am so thankful that CC has taken a more holistic approach to automotive history, and that our archives cover the full range of the automotive experience. Statistics are a useful tool, but creating a more complete picture—which is of course only a goal impossible to fully achieve—is a much more satisfying undertaking.

So a big thanks to all of you contributors we have created—and compiled, thanks to Eric—an enviable archive of our collective attempts to understand the automobile holistically. Perhaps we should change our motto to Every Car Has Multiple Stories.