Monday, April 10, 2006

Good News: 2006 Tractor Show Guide

We managed to get the 2006 Antique Tractor Show Guide online this year, and in just the nick of time. It's show season! As I mentioned in a previous blog, my sister Cindy entered the show data for us every year since 1999. She died last Thanksgiving after a long illness at the young age of 39. As a result we did not have a tractor show guide for 2005 and many of you missed it.

Thanks to my friend Mary Lutz and her husband Brian, we now have an updated 2006 Show Guide online! They spent many many hours typing in the data and proofing it.

I spent the weekend updating the show guide software so that you can now enter your club's tractor show directly into the guide if you do not see it listed. We're starting out with only 561 shows so I'm hoping if you have a show, or know of a show not listed you will enter it.

Thanks! Hope to see you at a show this year!

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Good News: Classified Ads for Antique Tractors

Some of you will be very excited and happy to hear that you can now delete your classified ad! We've always had the capability in the Photo Ads, but the regular classified ads - which we've had online since 1995 - were still running on the original software and never offered the delete option.

This has been a problem for many of you. Especially if you had something for sale at a real good price that many people wanted. The good news is you sold it the first day! The bad news is that the ad continued to run until it was automatically deleted two weeks later. A case in point is the time a gentleman contacted me in a panic. He had sold his tractor to the first caller, but the phone kept ringing off the hook! His wife was getting very angry at him and could I please delete the ad immediately. Of course I did, and have deleted ads for many people when they couldn't wait for it to automatically be deleted after two weeks.

Finally, and long overdue, you can delete your ads.

But there's even more good news! A few years back I got an email from a fellow that said, "I don't know why you call the ads on your website Classified Ads. Normally advertisements are in categories, i.e., they are 'classified' into specific groups. Your ads are all jumbled up in one big list.".

I thought about that for awhile and realized he was right. But people seemed to like our antiquated ad software - it was kind of like reading the bulletin board at the local feed store. You just keep scanning them one by one in hopes that you'll come across something that catches your eye. But it is several years later now and our ads have grown tremendously. In the classified (er, unclassified) Ads page we are seeing between 1800 and 2000 new ads every two weeks. It has to be the largest bulletin board any feedstore has ever seen. It takes a long time to wade through everything that's for sale.

So Chris rolled up his sleeves this weekend at my request and modified the Classified Ad software so that it now has "Categories". You choose a category when you submit your ad, and people can use that when they are searching. For example, you can search for tractors in Kansas and not have to wade through the ads for parts too. Chris also added the delete option for you. He has a regular day job so his time is limited... but I'm sure he can hear the big round of applause from the YT community for making the Classified Ads easier to use!