If you are into Type 34 Karmann Ghia's, chances are that at some point you would have come across the name Mick Percy. If the name sounds familiar to you it's probably because you have spent some time over at Type34.com or as it's more commonly known The Type 34 Registry where Mick has been the resident webmaster for the past ten years. You might also know him from right here on VDubber.

The build of Mick's '65 Sunroof Type 34 spans some 18 years, two continents and several changes in direction.

Here's Mick to tell you a little more ...

 Nick Bentley's Badass Rat Oval

Nick Bentleys 56 rat oval is a regular part of the South Australian scene and can often be spotted at events and meets. Sporting perfect patina, a big Type 4 power plant, all round disc brakes and a close ratio box not only does it look badass, it's lots of fun to drive too. Here's a bit more about the man and the rat straight from the horses mouth...

The long overdue update to Vdubber is finally here. The new look site is now live and not only does it have a new appearance but the whole site has been rewritten from the ground up. There's heaps more features and its far easier to use than the old site. The reason for this is that the software platform that the site runs from has been replaced with a more streamlined version. But rather than bore you with techno-mumbo-jumbo, the best way to tell you about the new features is to give you a bit of a tour.

The new site update is nearing completion. Just a few more bugs to iron out and we will be permanently migrating to the new platform. The new site has a whole bunch of new features and is much more user freindly.

The biggest changes are to the way things work. The features are mostly the same but the new site will be a lot smoother. There are of course some great new features such as twitter and facebook integration. This means that posts you make here can also be posted to your facebook page and twitter feed. They will also appear on the vdubber facbook and twitter pages too.

The estimated time until launch is about a month, so please start preparing for something great.

vdubber.

​Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. What started off as an idea a few months ago, has finally grown into Issue 1 of our Ezine. Utilising MelleMels skills as a typesetter and contributions from the UK, we have managed to put together our Ezine Debut. We're rather proud of it. The Ezine is 100% free and can be accessed at the link below. ...

Welcome to the new vdubber site blog.

We've set the blog up to provide a dedicated channel of communication for site related news, events, shows, and any other stuff related to vdubber, and the website in general. This is mostly as we are having a bit of a rethink about how the site works. Some changes have already been made, such as the addition of the Wall, and the opening up of permissions to promote more site activity, which so far seems to be working quite well, but there is still quite a way to go before we get the site to where we would like to be.

We feel that a segregation between the stuff that happens for the site, and the stuff that happens elsewhere, is better, so we have chopped around the old automatic male and female friend accounts created on joining, and merged them into one account, (This one). And we will now post all site related, and administrative stuff via this account. If you do not have vdubber in your friends list, we will get around to adding it to all accounts, this means that you will always have a direct line of communication to an admin, should you need it, and we will always be able to keep in touch with you to let you know about critical issues should they arise.

There's still plenty of stuff planned with the site including another major update, which will be started over the coming weeks. Most of the changes will be under the decklid, but there will also be some more noticeable changes too.

We will be having a major rethink about the ads section, as this is very much underused. Compared to most classifieds systems, it's quite well featured, but something is causing it to be overlooked, and we will also look at better promotion of other areas of the site too.

The Holiday season is nearly here again, and to celebrate this we are offering a fantastic prize of a six months subscription to Volksworld magazine. The winner will be the member with the greatest amount of points amassed for December on our leaderboard.

Points can be earned from all site activities, but posting premium content, such as blogs, photos, videos and forum posts will get you the greatest number.

To check how many points each different site activity will earn you, you can view the Points Home Page. You can also check your points history there too, this will tell you where you have earned the points you already have.

Good luck with the competition, and happy posting. :)

vdubber

Just added a great new feature to the photos section - Photo tagging.

Photo tagging allows you to highlight areas in a photo, and associate a tag with it. The tags are visible when you hover over the photo, and also when you hover over the tag description at the bottom of the photo.

The tag can comprise of either a short text description, or you can pick someone from your friends list. If you are tagged in a photo, or have a photo tagged by someone else, you will automatically get an email letting you know.

Tags can be removed by the person who placed the tag, the photo owner, or in the case of being tagged by someone else, you can also remove the tag yourself.

We have also made an update to the groups photos capabilities. We've now added the ability, for each group to add dedicated photo albums, and also added the ability to include a title and description for each image. This is a massive improvement compared to the previous way of managing photos within groups, and one we feel will make the groups section a lot more useable.

Over the next few days we will be performing some scheduled maintenance tasks and updating the website. The website update is to address some performance issues, and some minor bugs. The update process should be relatively straightforward as we will be preparing a test run on our local servers prior to updating the live site.

If you do experience any disruption to the site over the following days, we ask that you simply try hitting the refresh button on your browser. We expect that disruptions should be minimal, and short of duration.

We thank you in advance for your patience.

Vdubber.

Another new year is with us, and it's once again time to make resolutions and see if we can stick with them. This March will see the second birthday for Vdubber, and it's good to see that we are still here. We are still chipping away at increasing our member base and site activity, but as usual with any new venture, these things take time to gain momentum.

A recent conversation with a new site user alerted me to the fact that the perception of the site was that of just another Volkswagen forum, which surprised me a little, as I had always considered that the site was geared more towards everything other than being a forum. Much though i would like to discount his observation. It's probably a valid one.

Promoting a site like this is difficult. There is no other site that provides the same feature-set as Vdubber. Which is largely aimed at being a social network, rather than being simply another forum. There is really no point in trying to compete with the established giants like VZI, TheSamba, Aussieveedubbers etc. These are long established forums, and there would be little success in trying to persuade anyone that Vdubber's forum offers anything better then they already get at their favourite site.

This is why the idea behind Vdubber was to provide the social networking features that the established forums did not. Things like Blogs, Photo and Video hosting, Groups and other social networking tools. We saw that there was a niche to make a site to provide these things. But whilst the niche is there, it is not really clearly defined.

So far Vdubber has been promoted as a 'community' site, an 'aircooled social network'. But both of these descriptions are too subtle. Neither really explain what Vdubber 'is', or what Vdubber is about. What we would really like to say is that Vdubber is 'Facebook for Volkswagens', but until now I have not wanted to make such blatant a statement.

We've mentioned in the past that there is an update to the site in progress. The update is a pretty major process and involves a complete rewrite of the code, in fact we are moving away from the current platform to a more stable and better supported platform from a different vendor.

Whilst there will be quite a few improvements in the operation of the site, one of the things we hope to acheive is to shift the focus of the site a little. In the past we have had forums, and then we disabled then, followed by re-enabling them and the bottom line is simply that they do not work. My guess is that there are simply too many other VW sites that people are used to using (VZI, TheSamba, Shoptalkforums etc) and getting people to use a forum that is low in traffic and interest is an impossible task at best. We originally tried to pique peoples interest by having a monthly competition and offering prizes to the biggest contributors in the hope that we could get half a dozen regulars to contribute, this would have hopefully kick started the site into action, but it was not to be.

So, for the update, several areas of the site will simply cease to exist, these include the forums, the directory, classifieds and groups sections. The focus will be shifted to blogs and the site focus will change.

As the site seems pretty slow at the moment, it is a perfect time to make the change. So if you see things dissappearing, or not working, it will no doubt be because of the update.

Fingers crossed.