jimmypribble.com/blog

July 10, 2005, my website UrS4.com celebrates its sixth year on the Internet. On the same date (actually a couple of days before), I pulled the plug on UrS4.com and replaced it with this new and more personal site.

First uploaded to the Internet on July 10, 1999, as Jimmy’s Audi S4 quattro Pages, my site focused on the ‘92-’95 Audi S4 and S6, rare sport sedans with perhaps the best turbocharged engine Audi has ever made. It was also my first effort as a website designer. The site was built using an early version of Microsoft Publisher (WYSIWYG) and was heavily influenced by the color schemes of Audi’s corporate web site at the time.

On December 14, 1999, UrS4.com debuted, replacing Jimmy’s Audi S4 quattro Pages with a new domain name, a new logo, and an all new design. I began using Microsoft Front Page (still WYSIWYG) to build and maintain the site. The site temporarily went black in horror of 09.11.01., but otherwise continued to serve as a technical FAQ for the Audi enthusiast community.

In 2002, the latest version of the site was published, featuring much easier navigation and a cleaner layout. At it’s high point between 2002 and 2004, site statistics indicate that UrS4.com got about 200 unique visitors per day, who generated about 100,000 hits per month.

By the time the site reached its high point though, my own interest in the site had started to change. I was adding more and more personal content on the site at the same time that I was ignoring the core content, which I haven’t updated in over two years. So, I decided to let my friend Darin Nederhoff steward my old site here, at S-Cars.org. We have been cooperative sites almost since the beginning and even though it wasn’t necessary, he will even be hosting a full “classic” version of UrS4.com, when it was at its best. Of course, the site is also completely archived at the Internet Archive here. Even in disrepair, UrS4.com leaves its independant status as the 1,677,575th most visited site, according to Alexa. That’s not bad for a homemade enthusiast site without any traffic generating features (forums, classified ads, etc.) Well, until you consider that Zombo.com is at 108,884. My own employer is only a little better than 1.2M. So, my new goal is to crack a million.

The new site will obviously be much more personal in nature. I have finally bent to the idea of having a blog! The site will also have an archive of notable posts that I have made on Internet forums over the years, as well as copies of the personal travelogues and track reports that were already on the old site. I don’t know what else I will put on this site, but I hope to have fun with it. Another difference in this site is that I am coding this site completely by hand in Macromedia Dreamweaver. This is a huge step for me and I have to thank my wife Kimberly (who is a professional programmer) for giving me the encouragement (as well as a little tutoring) to do this. It has already proven to be both rewarding and frustrating. I can see why my wife likes this - it is something to completely obsess over! I have already done so while trying to get the site to look the same in Microsoft Internet Explorer as it does in Mozilla Firefox (which it still does not). And then there is all of the unkempt code strewn all over the page. I spend half of my time just trying to get source code to line-up neatly, even though it really makes no difference whatsoever. I probably should have followed my friend Rob’s advice and just got an account with Blogger, incorporated it into a basic site and been done with it. Now I’m having to do everything by hand and I don’t even have all of the nifty Blogger features like reader comments and auto-archiving. I’m a moron.