Holy crap, it’s Friday, which means the Autopian has officially survived its first full week! I’m not going to lie: I’m exhausted, and I know David is too, and I’m pretty sure both of our diets have been the sort that would make a nutritionist slap us, hard, and with genuine rage. That said, we’re grateful you’re here reading this site, and we’re thrilled to work with incredibly talented contributors. David and I still can’t believe all of this is real.
Speaking of contributors, let’s shout them out by name, why not, because they deserve it. We got our fellow car-obsessive Thomas Hundal, cranking out the content; there’s Mark Tucker, giving us our daily serving of shitboxes, hot and fresh every morning; we have our incredible design twins, The Secret One and Adrian Clarke; our engineering-mistake confessor Huibert Mees; Rex Bennett, our man inside the Lane; the Navy’s finest pants-shitter, Bobby Mackay; small-town gearhead anthropologist David Wilson; the GOAT himself, Murilee Martin; our China-car savant, Tycho de Feijter; and our fantastic extra topshot artist, Syd.
How did we manage to pull together such a fantastic team?
We know we have a long way to go to make everything the way we — and you — want it to be. There are still changes we want to make to the design, the commenting system, the pace of our writing — pretty much everything. We probably should get our asses in gear and sell a few ads, too. (Until then, who wants to buy T-shirts in bulk?)
Most importantly, we want to know what you, our fantastic readers, think! We started this site because we want to produce stories and videos and whatever you want to read, watch, listen, and enjoy! If there’s something you don’t like, or want more of, or less of, or whatever, let us know, right here in the comments, and we’ll do our best to make things better. We’re constantly striving to improve, and we’re very open to new ideas.
Thank you all for reading. I really mean that, and I know David and Beau mean it, too. We’ve been busy, but we’ve been having a great time; it’s all been a reminder of why we wanted to do this in the first place: because we love cars, and we love the way cars bring people together.
Except maybe for a couple of jerks on Reddit. But you know, that’s the internet.
(image: Skoda Classic)
Loving the content!!!
Issues:
1. The site is pretty slow to load pages and articles.
2. Site needs notifications of new replies and likes to comments
Yeah, half of the articles load immediately and then occasionally it will take 15-30 seconds to load a story. Not sure why the inconsistency.
I dunno, I tried to leave my first comment the other day and it’s STILL awaiting moderation approval. So maybe fix that? I was stuck in the greys at Jalopnik for fifteen fucking YEARS (still am, in fact), so this situation where I’m blocked from commenting while other people aren’t feels a little too familiar, and not in a good way.
I like the site so far. One thought, though. Most of the posts have been lengthy reads. Although this is generally a good thing, it would be nice if some shorter posts were mixed in. I tend to read automotive websites when I am taking mental breaks at work. I find myself migrating to Jalopnik at these times, mostly because they will usually have something short and entertaining. A lot of readers criticized Jalopnik for the click-bait nature of their articles (I would share their criticism), but sometimes I’m looking for something short and vapid. Maybe try to include some filler posts in between the lengthy posts?