Hi Gang…

What a great ride this has been the past 6-12 months.  I’ve made more friends with those of you out there and have had a great time learning from many of you too.  I couldn’t have had more fun if I tried.

But….a few things happened this past few months that made me realize we needed to change the approach of our interest group to make it useful to all of us – and future folks too who become interested in these cool cars and their history.  So….we now have a whole new approach that incorporates many different things that have previously been in different places.  I’m proud to introduce each of you to the rollout of our new Forgotten Fiberglass Website.

Forgotten Fiberglass Website:

The website URL is www.forgottenfiberglass.com  You will want to save this on your desktop.  From this website, you can get to the following areas:

• Our new discussion board called the “Fiberglass Forums” (more about that later)
• Our old website which is www.fiberglasssportscars.com (this will be incorporated into the new website over time),
• Links to websites of interest for our group,
• And an “About Us” page which will be expanded as more historians join us in researching and writing about these cars

The front page of our website will feature stories that have previously been written in e-mails from me to each of you. Yes that’s right…no more e-mails from the google group called forgotten fiberglass.  I will be deleting that group in the next few weeks.

If one of you want to write a story, I’ll post it for you and give you credit for having written it.  Just e-mail it directly to me.  All stories that appear on the front page of Forgotten Fiberglass will be archived and the archive will be able to be searched so that things each of us have lost via e-mail will not happen again.

The story will also be repeated in the “Fiberglass Forums” discussion board so that each of you can comment on it and contribute your thoughts – instead of replying to the e-mails we have been doing.  All of this should sound familiar with those of you used to the wonderful website run by my friend Ryan Cochran – The Jalopy Journal (www.jalopyjournal.com).  Kudos to Ryan for creating such a excellent approach to support an interest group.

Other features currently shown on the front page is a gallery of magazine front covers showing these cars – that changes each time you visit the website.  A video area at the bottom which shows a video from youtube of interest (a rotation of 5 is currently set and these change each time you visit the website), and hot news is a text link to things of interest – currently I have items and cars on ebay for you to review.

Fiberglass Forums Website:

The website for the new discussion board for forgotten fiberglass is http://forum.forgottenfiberglass.com/  I will be deleting the old discussion board in next few days.  The reason the old discussion board could not be used is that we were too successful in using it.  That is…I found the following limitations that I could not correct or purchase options to replace:

• First, we could only have a total of 200 images on the discussion board – ever.  This means for archive purposes, this would be a problem.  Each of you know me…I’d have 200 images on there in less than a month.  There is not a limit on the amount of space we now use although it will cost me more per month when we have more space used.
• Second, we could only make one attachment per post.  The new postings allow up to 10 attachments per post for images.

For these reasons, the old discussion board will be soon deleted.

As with the old discussion board, you’ll have to sign up and register (it’s free) to post information on it.  You can review information on it without signing up.

Summary:

So…I encourage each of you to start looking at the websites above.  As you do, know that I’ll be continuing to make changes to these websites to make them more usable and fun for all of us to enjoy.  I’m currently expanding some of the American Fiberglass Car Marques in the Bulletin Board so the list stops (alphabetically) at Grantham Stardust, or so.  I’ll be working on the remaining discussion boards for these cars in the next few days.

Have some fun..checkout the new sites, if you have questions or comments, post them on the discussion board or e-mail them to me like you always have.  I’m well aware that there is a transition time needed – and support to each of you – to get you going on how to use these features, and I’ll always do my best to help.

Go get ‘em gang..

Sincerely,

Geoff Hacker