About MotoFaction

MotoFaction is largely a one-man operation, though with regular consultation with industry experts like Murray Feldman (of Murray’s Carbs fame).

Want to know more about any particular aspect of the site? Click on the headings below for more information, or scroll down for information about how to support the site.

Why does MotoFaction exist?

I always found it frustrating having to wade through years – or decades – of old forum posts to try and get the information I wanted about the car, bike or coding problem I was working on at the time. My solution was to keep detailed notes, and eventually it occured to me that putting up the notes online would help people in a similar situation. The more information there is out there and the better quality the writeups are, the more great old vehicles we can keep on the road safely without having to resort to paying a great deal of money to specialist mechanics.

I always try to explain everything down to the very basics with minimal assumed knowledge – so rather than just saying “and now check the slide pins” I try to explain what they are, where they are, what you are looking for when you check them and what you should do about it if you find a problem.

How do you get the photos looking the way they are?

In a past life I was a professional commercial photographer, and I kept some of the equipment after the business closed. A lot of it is experience but the gear certainly helps – I currently shoot with a Canon 5D Mark III, 100mm f/2.8L IS, 50mm f/1.2L and a couple of 600EX flashes when I need more light. Almost all of the photographs are shot in ambient fluorescent light at high ISO – it’s testament to modern cameras that they require such a small amount of post-processing to get them to look the way they do.

Oh, and software – Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC are the primary software tools, with Dreamweaver CC and Illustrator CC being used for the website and logo/infopic work. The downside of Adobe’s new plans is that it costs me $75/month to keep up the software subscriptions… and now there’s no business to pay for that 🙁

What are you running this website with?

The website is hosted on a Debian VPS on the wonderful Binary Lane datacenter in Sydney, Australia. If you are in the market for a VPS I can’t recommend them enough – at one point I have had over a dozen VPS with them and have zero complaints.

This website started out as cx500info.com and was WordPress-based, as that was what I was largely working with at the time. I found it somewhat frustrating after a while in terms of making it work as a reference site, so I moved to Drupal 7, and then Drupal 8 when we moved to MotoFaction. Drupal 8 was an exercise in frustration of a different nature, as the team decided to re-write just about everything and no plugins were carried over from 7… leaving a huge gap in functionality when coming from 7.

As of mid-2016 the website has been entirely re-worked to be database-free and is built using the Zurb Foundation 6 frame work, which has been a pleasure to work with. No more database means I can have the website in it’s entirety living on my desktop where I can make updates locally and simply rsync them (bash script + ssh keys ftw) seamlessly to the local test server, verify I haven’t broken anything, then sync them to the live server. It involves staring at Dreamweaver or Sublime Text rather than looking at pretty GUI but it’s working nicely.

How can I support the site?

Like the site? Found an article helpful? Help me maintain it and write more articles! We serve millions of how-to pictures annually and it’s not cheap! The advertising does help but it falls well short. We’re not a charity or not for profit, so this isn’t tax deductible and you won’t receive anything physical for hitting “buy it now” – only gratitude!

The online tools (the CX500 stator test etc.) take well over a hundred hours of coding to complete – with some more support I can fund further tools whose coding requirements are beyond my abilities.

$10 of support:
Amazon Wish List – help fund more reviews and work with tools etc.!

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