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Expercraft?

airguy

Unrepentant fanboy
Sponsor
I have my builders log backed up, of course - but the Expercraft site appears to have been down for about a week now. Anybody have any insight into this?
 
This morning on the Expercraft site - RIP Expercraft.

"In November of 2007 I launched ExperCraft to the public. It started out as a completely free service and evolved into a voluntary pay system for what proved to be a very useful tool for many builders and restorers of aircraft.

My aspirations were to generate revenue by advertising relevant products to builders who need them, while providing a tool to make building and tracking your aircraft project easier and more enjoyable and automatically publishing an easy to share web site.

While the product did help the builders and inspectors, I found it very difficult to break into the experimental aircraft advertising market due to a variety of factors mostly around potential advertisers having small budgets, dedicating the ad dollars to shows, glossy magazine publications or other long entrenched advertising efforts.

I had to keep my day job, so to speak.

With the "pay what you want" system, ExperCraft operated at nearly break even for many years covering most of the operating expenses, with me covering the difference. To my dissapointment, I could not afford to invest in further development, as was my original plan. Eventually the software fell too many versions behind to be easily updated.

A recent update broke the system, though no data has been lost.

I'm sorry to you and the experimental aviation community that I have not been able to develop this tool to make it the success I had envisioned and that now it is suspended.

I will work to provide data dumps for interested users. I'll respond to email messages individually.

Also, I intend to bring the system back up, but in a better state in the near future. With my current financial state and work commitments, I cannot make any promises on delivery dates.

My more than 11 years experience with ExperCraft, including being a speaker at Oshkosh, attending dozens of aviation expositions and fly ins (with EAA, AOPA and many other groups) and meeting dozens if not hundreds of people from all over the USA and the world who were aircraft builders and expercraft users has been a rewarding and enriching aspect of my life.

Thank you for being an active member of the experimental aircraft community and keep going on your projects. The most important thing for you and the whole industry is that you make your aircraft fly. Finish it and fly it. Be safe and have fun.

Sincerely,

Rob

Please direct questions and inquiries to rob at riggen dot org"
 
I just sent an email to rob to be part of the data dump so we'll see. It's a bummer the site is no more but I'm glad if appears he's giving users the ability to retrieve their data. I'm not sure if I'll ever need it but better safe than sorry so to speak.
 
Rats.

All the images I have posted here in the last 14 years are now toast.
I have the PDF backup of my Expercraft entries and of course all the images are filed on my home computer but rebuilding for fixing VAF image links is not something I have time to do. At least not until I retire.

Ah well. I knew the risks. The site was very useful during its life. Thanks Rob.
 
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Your suggestion for hosting images to post here on VAF is........?

Dropbox worked well, until it didn’t. Imgur is doing good so far. But I am a cheap pilot and not so prolific picture poster, so I did not venture into the pay to play world of Smugmug, which has been previously recommended here. I did just spring for an Office 365 subscription as I think this upstart Microsoft might be viable for a while. That comes with 6TB of clouds, not sure if pictures on forums is an easy thing to do with them.
 
But I am a cheap pilot

Aren't we all... Love the mantra "Cheapest thing in the plane is the pilot".

I did a little surfing of my own VAF posts today and I find the URL links to my Expercraft pages are dead ended with Rob's notice but the images I linked directly are still showing. Maybe those will go away soon.

Back in the modem days, my ISP included some "web storage space". I ran a web page for my grey market GP replica motorcycle, in support of a club, at that time. More recent ISPs don't provide that space for cheapskates anymore. :rolleyes:
 
$20/year will get you your own domain name, you can point that at whatever web space you can get access to. As long as you keep backups, you can move to a different provider on a moment's notice... Just move the content to the new site, and redirect the domain to the top level of the new site. Links all stay the same, and you're reasonably protected from ISP death.
 
Anybody talk to Rob about this lately? The website response has changed - now it just displays "Coming Soon..."

Dare I hope?
 
Text of Expercraft Logs Available

From time to time I Google to see what's happening with ExperCraft. It looks like a few months ago Rob Riggen accomplished a recovery of some textual logs, but not photos, expense or time log yet. That alone is a great help. This seems to indicate photos could come. He has our contact info so you would think he would communicate some updates.

You can cut and past this link, but when you do simply type in your ExperCraft user name as shown here over myusername. Good luck!

http://websites.expercraft.com/myusername



Try this link below if you want to see the page I found with the instructions.

http://websites.expercraft.com

J Morrical
 
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From time to time I Google to see what's happening with ExperCraft. It looks like a few months ago Rob Riggen accomplished a recovery of some textual logs, but not photos, expense or time log yet. That alone is a great help. This seems to indicate photos could come. He has our contact info so you would think he would communicate some updates.

You can cut and past this link, but when you do simply type in your ExperCraft user name as shown here over myusername. Good luck!

http://websites.expercraft.com/myusername



Try this link below if you want to see the page I found with the instructions.

http://websites.expercraft.com

J Morrical

Thanks for that. I have all my photos plus the pdf download I did of my original pages for presentation at FAA inspection. The part I am missing is about 60 text entries created in phase 1 and phase 2. I see I can get those now with the link you posted.

Maybe someday my web page will go back up. Will have to wait for retirement though.
 
EAA has an online builders log operating for members!

Last week at my EAA Chapter 302 monthly meeting in Conroe, TX I learned EAA has an online Builders Log up and running! Apparently it was announced at AirVenture 2019 Oshkosh this year. Charlie Becker, EAA Director of Chapters, also made the announcement in the EAA September Chapter Video Magazine.

I use a Mac and for convenience had been using web based ExperCraft. It shut down without warning months ago as you may know. I lost control of my log although some was backed up. I had purchased KitLog Pro a few weeks ago, but couldn't face transitioning to a PC and hadn't made any progress toward reviving my log. Fortunately for me, I have recovered most of my textual entries from ExperCraft, but no photos, no time on sections of the build or expense log etc. I am happy to say I am in the process to rebuilding my log on the EAA log. It is easy to cut and paste text from the document recovered from ExperCraft. Photos are easily dragged and dropped or searched to my entries.

My cloud of frustration over my log is clearing!

http://EAABuildersLog.org


Jim Morrical
 
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