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How Did CarMemories Come to Be? |
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My first car was a 1966 Mustang
coupe. I loved that car so much I still own it. It took me through high
school and college. I learned about Fords and Mustangs in order to keep
it running. Some years after college, I decided to find a fastback
Mustang to restore. In my search, I stumbled over a 1968 GT 350 Shelby
Cobra. Little did I know the impact that car would have on me.
Shortly after buying my Shelby, my local Mustang friends convinced me to join the Fort Wayne, Indiana, Mustang club, the Old Fort Mustangers. The club's newsletter needed an editor. My good friend, Biff Hitzeman, who was also a member of the club, and I had taken a lot of journalism classes together at college. Seemed like the thing to do, so we took over the club's newsletter, Ponytalk. With the help of my mother, Donna Begley, we published the Ponytalk for a number of years. During those years, I learned a lot about Shelby Mustangs, Shelby American and Carroll Shelby. I became fascinated with the Shelby story. Biff and I wrote many articles about the cars and the people. We kept those articles on disc. Many years later, the internet came to be. One night in a conversation, my mother suggested I put those articles on the internet. We still had those discs. Seemed like the thing to do so I taught myself HTML and converted them to web pages. Shortly after that I bought the domain, TheCarSource.com. My pages started getting more and more hits. I was surprised at the popularity of my pages. I was invited to join the first list. My list sponsor found my web site, TheCarSource.com, and invited me to be a founding member. TheCarSource.com continued to grow in popularity. Grew to the point that this hobby was starting to cost me more and more each month. When it hit $200 in bandwidth charges a month I started shopping for a new host for the pages. At this time, I happened to meet Brian Woodruff of Soundconcepts.net. Brian had a web development business. He was hiring employees and needed to offer them benefits, which is what I do in my day job. During our conversations he told me about his servers on the internet and that he hosted web pages. I explained my need for a cheaper hosting cost so we worked out a deal and I moved my pages. One day Brian came to me, surprised at the popularity of my web page. He had reviewed the site and said he had a lot of ideas for it. And he made me an offer of partnering up to develop the site into a car community. He felt the real power of the net was to allow people with common interests to meet and form a virtual community. Made sense to me. I already had the domain, CarMemories.com. We made the decision to use that as the primary domain. He had an awesome piece of software he had developed for a client. So he, his team and I converted it to a car web site. This software is very unique. It is an on-line database that allows members to upload their own pictures and stories. The site displays them from the database. If you know how databases work, it gave us tremendous flexibility on how the site operates and how to use it. I still marvel at the power of it. One thing that became obvious to me is this could be a great tool for providing car clubs a gallery for their members cars. We made the changes to allow that. When Microsoft bought our prior list vendor and eliminated out list, I got my web partner to make me a tool to create a new Shelby Mustang List. This is my contribution to the Shelby Legend. I see much more that we all can do to further the Shelby cars community on the net. CarMemories already has more Shelby car pics than any other site on the net and we have just started this effort. CarMemories can be the source of Shelby information on the net. I want to use it to support SAAC, Carroll Shelby and Shelby American's efforts. And I want it to offer all that it can to the owners of the cars. |
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