Way Back Machine: BuddySol’s Garage

When battling boredom, or most recently, passing the time watching a sleeping baby, I have been known to go on Google binges - the kind that seem to flow like one of those Bing commercials. Where a search on the color of baby poop ends up with how to code in HTML5. I don't know how that happened but it did, with key stops at the history of bocce ball and the nearest place in LA to get Italian ice. (I still don't know where to get the latter...anyone?) Well, one random search string ended up here: BuddySol's Garage. How I ended up here I have no clue, but when I saw the link staring back at me on Google's search results I was sucked back into time. Buddysol's Garage is a page I made years ago as a concept side project to add to a small online aftermarket car parts store front, Import Junkiez.

Jumping into the history of this site here, Infamous and I had just opened up shop and were still tweaking away at inventory for the store. After finalizing the storefront, there was still a lot of unused storage within our hosting plan. With a hosting plan not being fully utilized I figured why not try to make people stay a while instead of just shopping then leaving. At the time, I was a regular member of HondaVision/AutomotiveTech.org forums, the TeamSolCal.com forums as well as a mod for HF. So while planning out this addition to Import Junkiez, I did not want to add on a forum because there were already dozens dedicated to imports, as well as running a forum would be pretty time consuming for just one person on the backend. So going off my love for my little sun bucket, I figured this should be more of a landing page for all things del Sol, with some commentary here or a mod build there. More bloggish - less forum flame war. After fleshing out BuddySol's Garage with Angelfire's WYSIWYG web builder I was quite happy with how it initially turned out. Too bad that was the end of moving along with that idea.

There really was no reason why it never got off the ground other than I decided to go in a different direction. Also, Team Sol had extensive walk thrus on many of their chapters' pages and a lot of what I wanted would just be regurgitated from TSI. There was also my fading interest with the del Sol - remember, at some point Buddy hadn't been washed for what seemed like years, let alone I had given up on changing the car's oil. So instead of BuddySol's Garage becoming  a part of an expanding Import Junkiez universe,  the IJ store would be the main draw of this site until Infamous and I decided to close up shop. In the end though, I was inspired by the blog approach to a web page so I kept the URL/site hosting and started to mess around with some crude blogging program made out of PHP. I haven't looked back since that first post. I still have a copy of the original posts hiding on a hard drive somewhere. Maybe at some point I'll integrate them here, but I think for now we'll just leave those in the lost files of Import Junkiez. I would rather leave you with the gallery from BuddySol's Garage. Who knows how long they'll be up at Angelfire so I've decided to import them here.  There's some hot Sols in there - keep in mind tho, most of them came from TSI

Hit the jump for the gallery!