Hi Gang…

When do you celebrate a birthday?  How ‘bout now!

I’m actually about 2 months late…..our website “Forgotten Fiberglass” was a year old as of November 16^th, 2010.  And this anniversary is just an arbitrary point in time.  Jon Greuel really got things going back in 2002 when he launched http://www.ladawri.com/.

So… let’s take a stroll down memory lane and look at some of the milestones accomplished along the way.

The Birth of LaDawri.com:

Jon Greuel purchased his LaDawri Conquest back in 1986, and immediately set on researching what he had found.  He soon was in touch with John Gulow, LaDawri Historian Emeritus, and the two worked together to produce the website http://www.ladawri.com/ which debuted on November 19^th, 2002.  That’s about 8 years before the beginning of https://www.undiscoveredclassics.com/

I entered the picture with good friend and fellow researcher Rick D’Louhy in the summer of 2006.  Jon Gruel and I combined efforts and continued to expand http://www.ladawri.com/ thru the Spring of 2008.  Along the way we changed the website name to reflect a broader range of cars, and the new name from about 2008-2009 was http://www.fiberglasssportscars.com/

(Note: The vestiges of this website still exist as we expand our new https://www.undiscoveredclassics.com/ website over time.  Eventually, http://www.fiberglasssportscars.com/ will be turned off.)

Websites Archeology:

For those of you interested in looking at the history of websites, you can visit:

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

This website allows you to put in the name of a website and look at images / pages from past years.  When you do this for http://www.ladawri.com/, you get the following information:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/ladawri.com

You can visit web pages from http://www.ladawri.com/from 2002 thru 2008.  Not all of the information is present, but it gives you a sense of how the website was setup.  Remember…you can do this for historical purposes on most websites that have been around since about 1996.

Forgotten Fiberglass Begins:

Our first post on Forgotten Fiberglass was on November 16^th, 2009.  Click here to view the first story on our website.  Forgotten Fiberglass started with just one story.  Currently we have 138 stories, spanning nearly 50 different fiberglass cars and over 150,000 words on our favorite topic – vintage fiberglass cars.

For those of you brave enough to look at our archive of stories, click here.  This will show you a one page listing of all stories on our website.

Forgotten Fiberglass Goes Viral:

Back in November 2009, we started with just over 500 visits to our website monthly.  The latest figures for www.forgottenfiberglass.com are as follows.  The statistics for the last 30 day period (Jan 1^st, 2011 thru Jan 31^st, 2011):

• Total visits to website:  7496 visits

This breaks down as follows:

• Unique visitors (visited at least once): 3193 individuals
• Returning visitors (a unique visitor who came back more than once): 4603

Top 10 stories for the 14 month period where Forgottenfiberglass.com has been on the Internet are the following (note, you can click on the links below to go to each of these stories):

1: Realizing Your Dream – The Dick Williams Sports Special (1513 views – while a great car, this is the number 1 story because the current owner is posting the car for sale on many different websites and linking to the Dick Williams story to provide detail on the car)

2: 1953 Dyna-Panhard Sports Car – Designed by Howard “Dutch” Darrin (960 views)

3: Where are Vintage Fiberglass Enthusiasts Going Next??? How about the Belfry…(“Boats in the Belfry”, That Is) (939 views)

4: The (Tom) Chandler Ford Flathead V8 Generator Solution (637 views)

5: Vintage Accessories: Get Those Hubcaps Guys and Gals!!! (635 views)

6: Stan Crawford’s Allied / Atlas Swallow – A Mid-Restoration Man’s Dream (591 views)

7: The Kaiser Mysterion – Darren Swansen’s Wonderful Find (583 views)

8: The Heritage of Kit Cars – The 1924 Mercury Sport Roadster – By Dean Batchelor and Dan Post (559 views)

9: The Cars of Amelia Island 2010 – Phil Fleming’s 1958 Devin Special (516 views)

10: 1953 Petersen Motorama: The Fiberglass Invasion! Glasspar, Atlas/Allied, Woodill Wildfire, Edwards, and Victress (486 views)

Forgotten Fiberglass Hosts Worldwide Audience:

Did you ever look at the bottom right of our home page?

There’s a box that says “Who’s Online” and shows the number of visitors online at the moment.  Since this part of our story today appears at the bottom, you might just “glance” to your right and easily see this area of the web page.  In this box, you can also click on the link that says “Map of Visitors.”  When you do, you get a world map showing a red dot for every visitor that has been on our site for the past 30 days.

For more easy access, click here to view the world map.

When you click on the world map, be sure to use the drop down menu and choose “World (large)” to get the best viewing.  Here’s the image of one that I created recently from taking this action.  The red dots below show individual visitors to Forgotten Fiberglass from all over the world.  In past months (not the image below), we’ve even had visitors who were stationed in Antartica.  I was surprised at this too!.

Here’s a recent “Visitor Map” for your review:

Summary:

So….this is how I celebrate birthdays gang.  Pretty dry, eh?  Probably way too much detail, but for those of you “statistics hounds” out there, it’s pretty cool stuff.

Hope you enjoyed the story, and until next time…

Glass on gang…

Geoff

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