We’ve enhanced our fuel economy survey and results. Now you can: edit previous entries enter the fill-up date on a tank indicate heavy cargo or towing (for exclusion from the public stats) enter comments report on electric vehicles toggle the units used in the results (either MPG or g/100m, for example) Also, you can now view fuel economy results and… More →
Category: Site Changes
Site Changes
Specs for Non-US Models and Powertrains
Members outside the U.S. and Canada have enrolled over 6,000 cars. In many cases either the model or the powertrain isn’t offered in the U.S. And, if we hadn’t entered specs for it in the database, no information could be posted about the car. I’d love to see information on these cars, so for the past week I’ve been entering… More →
Reviews
People have been asking me for years why I don’t post car reviews to TrueDelta. Part of the reason: I wanted a unique format, and none seemed quite right. Well, I found one that works, or at least hope I have! It’s based on the “Why (Not) This Car?” format we’ve been using for owner reviews. The biggest change: when… More →
Site improvements
Some day we’ll remember the months around last December’s site redesign fondly. Or maybe the memories will just fade. They were tough, real tough. Entirely redesigning the site resurfaced dozens of bugs that had been fixed over the years, and created many new ones. Thanks to member feedback (and a lot of hard work by Gayla) these are now largely… More →
New: direct links to the results, wish lists
A month ago we rolled out a complete redesign of the TrueDelta site. In addition to improving the appearance and navigation of the site, the redesign includes a few new features (with more on the way). To start, it is now possible to go to any of the results pages for your cars directly from “My Garage.” The drop downs… More →
I’ve been here before…
The current site is in its final days, perhaps even its final hours. For the past nine months we–and especially Gayla, my wife and for the past year our programmer–have been working to apply a new design to the site. She’s now working out the kinks in the Car Reliability Survey, the programming of which has always been complicated, and… More →
Site redesign preview
I had hoped to launch a redesigned site this month. The design itself is complete, but we’ve decided to more thoroughly re-engineer the site in the process of applying this new design to all of the pages. And we can’t risk downtime next month, which follows the end of the quarter so every survey response will be critical. Consequently, the… More →
Car Problem Descriptions
With members reporting about 2,000 new repairs every month, we need to more effectively present this information. The latest step: posting repair descriptions by problem area. Check this out here: Car repair reports by problem area
The back end, and simplified site navigation
The bulk of my coding hours in recent years have gone into the back end, to enable me to efficiently manage a site that now has over 60,000 members. I’ve been staying a step or two ahead, increasing productivity at least as fast as membership has grown. Looking back, I almost cannot imagine how I operated the site without the… More →
Breaking up the site
When I first designed the site’s pages we had a small percentage of the survey responses we now have. So I didn’t do anything fancy, and simply displayed all of the data for a model on some pages. As data have accumulated, these pages have gotten longer and longer, and slower and slower to load. Lately the repair history pages… More →