Lotus Elan and Lotus Elan Plus 2 Forums

I was looking at Trevor Sparrow's site:
http://www.geocities.com/trevorsparrow/ ... npages.htm
But the email address does not work any more.
Does anyone have current contact?


best regards, iain

Where has the website gone

Matthew

Looks like GeoCities itself has gone!

End of two Eras....

If Trevor's out there.....could he contact me. I may be able to facilitate hosting.

has anyone news of Trevor Sparrow

He flew the coop! (coupe?)

Bob

I'm not sure why anyone wants to contact me, but here I am! The Elan +2 is still running like a dream - after a full engine rebuild. As for the web site - long gone and dead as a dodo. Geocities folded up the site without warning and it was gone overnight. Although I still have all the content, it is a bit dated. To be frank I have been a bit reluctant to repost the site as the original version virtually killed my PC. I was getting hundreds of emails a day on the back of it. Some were genuine, but the bulk were just a nuisance - if I had a pound for every time I was asked to do some student's homework for him I would be a millionaire now.

Anyway, greetings +2 owners, its a great car, enjoy it.

Trevor

Hi Trevor,
I miss your web site very much. It was very useful when I bought my own +2 three years ago. It was good to have all important information at one place, such as parts original, performance charts, literature and so on...

Regards
/Ulf

Alas email addresses posted on a public website are a magnet for spam emails.

There are various tricks to prevent them being found by gleaner robots & to deter them being used by human spammers.

If you want some suggested hiding methods, (should you want to recreate your website) feel free to contact me.

It should be fairly easy to put any emailing facility & email addresses behind a gateway for which a potential questioner needs to know the name of a vital Lotus part before they can reach the email address.

My Elan +2 website is back.

I posted the original on Geocities about 10 years ago and although I left the site dormant for a long time, it racked up a surprising number of hits over the years, Finally, Geocities pulled the plug a while ago and the site disappeared

Didi, see the posting above, has somehow retrieved the site from the dark recesses of the internet and reposted it at the address below

http://lotuselan-plus2.be/trevorsparrow ... npages.htm

He has also given the site a new lease of life by recycling some of the content into another language (Flemish?). So many thanks to him for this, if anyone else wants to use the site, perhaps he can help you.

Trevor

Trevor Sparrow wrote:... He has also given the site a new lease of life by recycling some of the content into another language (Flemish?). So many thanks to him for this, if anyone else wants to use the site, perhaps he can help you.

Trevor

I living in Belgium, I am Flemish and the language is Dutch.

The link to the Lotus +2 website is
http://lotuselan-plus2.be or http://type50.com/

Didi wrote:

Trevor Sparrow wrote:... He has also given the site a new lease of life by recycling some of the content into another language (Flemish?). So many thanks to him for this, if anyone else wants to use the site, perhaps he can help you.

Trevor

I living in Belgium, I am Flemish and the language is Dutch.

The link to my website is
http://lotuselan-plus2.be

A caution:

Though it won't have much MORE effect now if that register has been up on the web already for a long time, presenting email addresses "in clear" as in the register WILL have them collected by spammers' robot search engines and they WILL get onto the lists that are sold around by spammers, so they will get lots of spam.

The net effect is the email address may become unusable due to being swamped. So posting contact links like that "in clear" tends to make it happen that the owner has to change his/her email address.

I prefer to hide any such personal information pages behind what I call a gateway page. Such a page has an entry type-in box and an obvios question that any interested person is likely to know. For Elan lists it could be say "What was the surname of the founder of Lotus Cars Ltd?". The gateway page then CONSTRUCTS the name of the next file including the word typed in, for instance it might be didi_chapman.html this means there is no link at all embedded in the gateway page that a search robot can follow. The gateway page then jumps to the page with that constructed name. Typing a wrong word gets a page-not-found error.

None of the search engines, including Google can automatically find the pages reached via the gateway page so you need to add all the key sentences needed to the gateway page itself, to lead new users to it via Google.

If you are interested I will dig out a copy of the HTML of the most basic gateway page which you can use as a start point; it is only about 30 to 50 lines ling.

Here is the basic coding for a gateway page including the little javascript function that creates the new file name and jumps to it.

Obviously you then decorate it to suit the rest of the site that it resides in and you add the paragraphs for humans and legitimate search engines describing what is behind the gateway.


<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Anti-Spammer Gateway Page</title>
<script Language=JAVASCRIPT TYPE="TEXT/JAVASCRIPT">
<!--
var pwx;
function doIt()
{
//NB for compatibility, note: element names are Case Sensitive.
pwx=document.forms["gate"].elements["search"].value
document.forms["gate"].action='didi_'+pwx+'.html'
return true
}
// -->
</script>
</head>
<BODY>
<div align=center>
<h1>Anti-Spammer Gateway Page</h1>
<h5 align="center">
To enter the web-site&nbsp;<BR>
please type the surname of the founder<br>
of Lotus Cars Limited</h5>

<p align="center"><center for opera>
<form name="gate" onSubmit="doIt()" action="qqqqq.htm" >
<input type="password" name="search"><br>
<input type="submit" value="Press to Enter" id=submit1 name=submit1 >
</form>
</center>
<h5 align="center">Note: If you enter the wrong word<br>
you will get "Page not Found".<br>
Use your Back-button to try again.</h5><br>
<H5></H5>
<p align="center">
For assistance contact <br>
WebMaster @ {put own doman here}.com<br>
{put your phone number here}</p>

<h2><A href="http://www.google.co.uk" target=_top>EXIT</A></h2>
</div>
</BODY>
</html>

Thx for the code.
Updated done

Ah, I forgot you might be using a case sensitive server such as unix or linux, so you need to convert the user input to lower case. So that it can handle "Chapman" or "CHAPMAN" or even "ChApMaN" . My original was for a Windows type server in which the filenames are not case sensitive.

So in the middle of the function it would be best to add the line:
pwx = pwx.toLowerCase()

Making the whole function:

<script Language=JAVASCRIPT TYPE="TEXT/JAVASCRIPT">
<!--
var pwx;
function doIt()
{
//NB for compatibility, note: element names are Case Sensitive.
pwx=document.forms["gate"].elements["search"].value
pwx = pwx.toLowerCase()
document.forms["gate"].action='didi_'+pwx+'.html'
return true
}
// -->
</script>