VDubber Magazine

Every now and then we need to reboot the site and today is one of those days

It's been seventeen years since I started VDubber, and  a bunch of years before that, that the content that would eventually become VDubber existed as other VW related sites that I created. All up it's been nearly 30 years since I first started on my VW internet journey. Before that if you needed parts you needed to join a club, scour the club magazines and go to swap meets. There was no Ebay or Amazon. 

I can remember sitting in a porta-cabin in Castle Bromwich in Solihul UK commissioning the new paint shop for Jaguar way back in 98, sneakily uploading my first website for my Type 34 Karmann Ghia project in my lunch break, that I had written in the evening whilst staying in digs. I can even remember the laptop I had, a Compaq that has 2 GB hard drive, a tad different from the normal Toshiba's that most softies used, and a world away from the 2 TB machine that I now use. Uploading the site via the company dial up internet during lunch to my Freeserve account. Ahh those were the days.

This was way back when no one liked Type 34's or even knew what they were, but also when the internet was still a very new thing. So creating a website was done in raw code, line by line, which was fine by me as writing code was both a hobby and a day job and I had plenty of time in the evening stuck in digs to learn a new skill. I still, mostly code by hand, even today. 

My digs were an interesting place. It was like a mock Tudor mansion right in the middle of Solihul almost opposite the Jaguar plant. The fella that ran it was a right character. If you picture Fawlty Towers, then you're on the right track, although to be fair the owner was no where near as neurotic as Basil Fawlty, even if they did share the same moustache. 

But I digress...

Over the years VDubber has been updated and migrated across several different platforms, each one requiring an amount of effort to migrate to. Each time having to learn a new codebase and generally being forced to upgrade due to old platforms just fizzling out, or in the case of the current update, simply selling the company without telling their clients

But this time things are a little different. Vibe coding is allowing me to maintain the codebase without needing to migrate to a different platform, which is great news. But it also allows me to modify the code without needing an army of coders. (thanks AI)

It also means that I can make changes to the code relatively quickly, something that was impossible to do on my own, without the support of a team of coders. 

New Direction

So here we are. An updated site and a new direction. I decided to really par things back and dumb things down. Reducing everything back to its most basic. The entire 'social media' style of site was just too complex for many, and so I've decided to remove the pages and groups and albums from the site and just concentrate on the blogs, as these are the basis for the main content. It's also easy to present content in a magazine style layout, and it's this that has determined the new direction, a magazine based site, written by you.

Years ago we created an online magazine with the intention of it being a regular thing, but it was a massive amount of work, and trying to get content contributors was a massive challenge. But now I've come to realise that the site IS the magazine. We can display the content in a magazine style layout and just dispense with the photo journalism requirements.

Of course multi blog sites like blogger are nothing new, but this one is VW only and has no distractions, just articles written by you, about the kind of things that you want to read, or at least want to write about.

Get involved

So, all it needs now is for you to get involved. Create a blog, add a post or two and tell everyone what you are driving, working on, or lusting after. Whatever it is that you are involved in, you can be sure that we want to read about it. Lets see if we can kick things off again and get some content flowing.

What are. you working on...?