In reply to dye :
There may be an alter ego admin at play there but what do I know. . . . Corner Carvers had Dr. ZTW. I never did sort out who that was. Maybe I could see if the good doctor would care to drop in every now and then. Generally the people over at Clarks are great. As an admin with "the power of the patio" at clarks house you would be supersized at just how rarely you actually need to wield that power. Only a very select special few have needed the all expense paid vacation package. Discreet PM's will usually take care of things. Public humiliation is never productive.
In all honesty it is not something I ever like doing. It is never a good feeling when I have had to hit the button.
Great job Dean. I was so saddened to hear of Clarks passing and was hoping that the site would remain as a legacy to a man who clearly spent many hours putting it together for the benefit of so many others. Respect to both you and Clark.
I just posted this over at Renlist but wanted to also keep people here updated
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Keeping you all updated. After a lot of reasurch and learning about phpbb I think I got the adding of new users sorted out. I have tested adding new users to the forum and it worked. However it looks like I have an issue with the server at the hosting services end of things. I have to call my isp on Monday. The issue is that users (everyone at the moment) can not access and change there profile.
I think once. Get that sorted I should be good to go. The next step will be to select a coupe people that have requested access and use them as test subjects. I don’t want to open the flood gates just yet if there is a problem.
And thanks for all the support from everyone. I appreciate it but the thanks for the site really should be directed to Clarks family. If it was not for them being as generous as they are this site could have gone away. As such All the thank you emails I have received have been shared with Clarks family. I think this means more to them than anything. They really had no idea as to how far and wide Clarks little site had become known and how many people it has helped.
I have got a couple emails with changes to some of Clarks shop manual and once I get the forum sorted that will be the next thing I sort out. I am thinking that any of the changes to the shop manual will be done as addendum to Clarks original content. This will preserve the original but also keep the site current as we continue to learn new or better ways to do things on these cars.
Anyway I just wanted to update you all. Thanks again for all the personal emails I have got.
I'm interested in how the site is maintained. It must be a bit difficult to update. Looking at some of the shop manual pages it seems that he used a program called Arachnophilia to edit some of his HTML pages, but then the main shop manual page was made in Word 2012 with all the attendant strangeness that it adds to HTML.
Also, the iframes are an unfortunate thing, because they really aren't used anymore for laying out a site generally or taken into account by things like search engines. When I search for Porsche 944 airbox removal for instance the clark's garage site does come up, but it's the sixth or seventh listing below the fold probably because the airbox removal page does not have the keyword Porsche in it anywhere and when I click on the link I get taken to this page.
http://www.clarks-garage.com/shop-manual/af-01.htm
Which of course has no context without the menu that's contained in the iframe page. If the site was laid out properly the various keywords like Porsche and 944 could be part of the page header and you could properly deep link to the pages on the site from other sites. As it stands there are probably plenty of people that don't bother because they don't understand how to find the link to the individual technical pages.
Also, ahead of this page in the search results I get Pelican Parts, their forums and the Rennlist forums which are much less useful overall. The Pelican Parts site is just a bunch of pictures whereas the clark's garage site has diagrams showing everything.
I'd probably do something to modernize the site to fix all of this so that it gets more traffic as it's obviously a valuable resource.
That is great information. I have no clue how it was made. There seems to be a hog-pog of editors used. I am still sorting that part out. I can edit all of it with a basic ms web page software I have. I have not spent much time with it other than editing the main page.
It seems like it's all manual, no content management or anything like that. I'd imagine he started it before CMS packages became ubiquitous.
I'd look into something like Wordpress or Joomla to update it. You can generate a complete site and then import the various static pages. The plugins available for Wordpress are numerous and allow you to generate layouts and content relatively easily.
For instance if you wanted to generate a table of contents page similar to the one that he has for the shop manual there is a plugin that will do that.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-table-of-contents/
Wordpress is already setup to hook your content into the modern web so you don't have to worry about doing all of that yourself.
First off, thank you for saving the site. Much appreciated! I'd buy a sticker, or even a bound copy of the printed out pdfs!
If we get to make requests, my biggest wish for the site is for it be mobile friendly. The iframes design is rough viewing on the iphone, and I like to read it as I work. It also boogers up back button behavior.
If you need any help, I'm software developer with a lot of experience up and down the stack. I know it's all static pages, but I'd pitch in to preserve such a valuable community resource
He probably just needs people to cut / paste / format the static pages into the CMS site he chooses. Once the pages are in and look decent the navigation in a CMS is relatively easy to cook up. And the themes/templates that these things use are almost always available with a responsive design.
Mobile is huge these days, especially for guys working in their garage. They are likely on a tablet or phone looking things up. For bigger projects I actually have a Chromebook I setup with a TV/monitor in the garage so I can reference things, but for small stuff I'm usually on my phone.
