See blog posts from: 2023-2024 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018
It's incredible. My website is growing so much recently.
I used to think that 7 views of my site was a lot. Nowadays I get about 125-175 views a day. And a lot of people visit my website now.
In fact, if I searched something like "wisconsin dealer plate" in image search, you'd have to scroll to the absolute bottom just to see a completely irrelevant image from my site. Nowadays if you search something like "wisconsin truck plate" in image search my own photos actually are on the "images of this search" box when you search websites on Google. That's crazy.
One big thing that gives me enjoyment in making this site is knowing that others also enjoy my site and can use it as a resource for whatever plate questions they may have.
I haven't gotten any emails yet, though. I'm sure most of the people who visit my site are just asking random, one-off questions to Google and never visiting my site again. But knowing that people who have questions about Wisconsin license plates can have their questions answered by my messy site is enough for me.
Thanks to everyone that has visited my site, whether you are a regular visitor who is an obsessive license plate enthusiast looking to see all the different serial blocks confirmed for certain plate types or you are just a single-time casual visitor looking up the 2022 Wisconsin sticker color, I appreciate you coming to my site.
And a special thanks to every Wisconsin license plate researcher that has come before me, like Andrew Turnbull, Cody James Corbett, and Eric Tanner. Without them, I would not have all the knowledge of Wisconsin license plates that I have at the moment. Without them, I wouldn't have even thought to make a website on license plates of any kind.
More images and serial ranges to come...
Wow. Time flies by quickly.
I have been recording my edits to serial range data and where the range comes from for exactly 1 year now. Before I would just put plate ranges down and take my own word for it. It was unreliable and I couldn't verify that a plate number I put down actually existed.
Every time I find an old unconverted serial range I record it as "[insert plate number here] before 9/20/20" to record that the time of editing is unknown, other than it was added before I started recording this information.
Now plate ranges can say "9/20/21." That's crazy
In other news, I've officially experienced using complicated software for website management. The interface feels so old... I kind of like it but it feels confusing at the same time. I personally hate the minimalist design of most sites as it sacrifices a lot of functions, but older designs are more confusing.
I've finally done it. I've finally taken pictures of almost all of my Heavy Truck plates. I've finally got all the plate images edited, I've finally gotten caught up with my ever-fast growing license plate collection.
I hate taking license plate images. Point blank. I live with OCD, so it's a chore taking a single image and cropping it. Every single simple action turns into an ordeal.
As such I've neglected adding images of license plates from my collection for about a year now. Actually, I still had yet to add images of Heavy Truck plates I got in Summer 2020. The last wave of Heavy Truck plate photos from my collection was in early September 2020, and I missed a few plates I think.
I've also forgotten a few plates, which I need to take pictures of soon and upload images of them too. I also have lots of Heavy Truck plate photos, either from plate meets, antique shops, or on-the-road shots that I have had for a while and haven't bothered editing or uploading them yet.
I've also added lots of serial ranges for Heavy Truck plates. I'm tired. I'm probably gonna take a break to focus on college like a responsible person, because I'm an idiot and I've procrasinated on assignments to deliver these updates. Here's hoping at least one person cares about my website for all the work I put into it.
Unbelievably, I've added a huge wave of new images. After 7 months of procrastinating, I've finally gotten around to adding (some) images. I've added lots of photos to the bus page and special plates page, and I still have lots more images to add. For example, I have a lot of early school bus photos that I don't have edited yet and I have to go and edit them. I probably have another few hundred images I haven't found yet that I have access to that I could add to these pages alone, but at the moment I'm focusing on adding the images I have on hand right now.
Why did it take me so long to add my images, you may ask? Well, let me explain. I hate adding images. And while I'm not going to detail every reason why I hate adding images, I'm going to say that it's very tedious. There's a post below this detailing why I hate adding images, so go read that if you care to know why I hate adding images.
Unfortunately, this also means that I have to slack somewhere. Which means that I haven't added any new serial ranges for a little while, except for the serial ranges I found on the road the other day that I had to write down quickly. I actually have some serial ranges written down in comments on my HTML documents, and I have to find the serial ranges and add them to their respective pages, because there was an XE Heavy Truck plate somewhere around XE28000 and a bunch of other serial ranges.
In other news, it's officially been half a decade exactly since I got this license plate:
2 days ago I brought a camera on my field trip to the trampoline park, which was an hour away in La Crosse. I brought my camera so I could snap pictures of license plates I saw on the road. I was able to take a lot of images of license plates, including:
2022 Passenger
Dec 2021 Apportioned
Mar 2022 Apportioned
Jun 2021 Tractor
2022 Truck
Heavy Truck GD83 (GD87nnn is the current high, jeez I'm far behind on these plates)
Heavy Truck RB31 (RB32 series has been found since then)
Heavy Truck HD(36 is what has been found so far)
Jun 2021 Heavy Truck
Dec 2021 Heavy Truck
Also, the last time I went junkyarding on May 7, I snapped a picture of the MC 5509 plate I saw that one day, and it's a confirmed number and it expired in March 2021, so I'll have to add that image sometime.
Welp, this summer has been the most license plate filled summer. Ever.
May 7th will be where I start my license plate finds list, because my hiatus from making these articles started after May 21, 2021, though my only mentioned the junkyarding trip when it came to the single Heavy Truck plate that I couldn't bring home (figures).
Anyway, of the new plates I picked up, I picked up:
2012 Farm
2016 Farm
2016 Truck
Temporary
2016 Disabled Placard (cool)
I probably picked up more plates but forgot about them. I went junkyarding again on June 4th (6/4, which makes 64, my lucky number), and got lots more plates, including:
2014 Farm
Improvements on multiple truck plates
June 2011 Heavy Truck
2009 Truck
The ultimate meme plate, a truck plate #JK6942 (if you don't know JK is an internet saying for "just kidding", and "6942" is a shortened version of "69420" which has become a meme all on its own, with the "69" being an... adult activity position, and "420" being a drug reference.) This plate was seen on a bumper in a pile of scrap parts on the way out, so I know I had to get it.
Truck temporary
July 17th was a great day. I found so many license plates that day, over 100 license plates for the first time ever, and I picked up a whole box of 1980's Heavy Truck plates for around $50 that day. I ended up paring lots of stickers off the Heavy Truck plates to bridge years for my insert sticker run, and I went a little crazy with the sticker paring.
The plates I got there included:
1946 4KX, 1947 1CX, 4CX, 1948 3ZX, 1949 4CX Heavy Truck tabs
1981 Semi Trailer
1983 Semi Trailer
1980 Heavy Truck plates that I pared the stickers down to display all quarters of 1980-1981
1980 Heavy Truck DA, DB, FA, GA, HA, QA
1982 Heavy Truck DA, DB, EA, FA, GA, HA, LA, PA
1985 Trailer September, EA weight class
1994 Heavy Truck DD, EB, FB narrow dies, GD wide dies, KB narrow dies
2007 Heavy Truck
Various Apportioned Trailer plates, including a first-issue 1978 plate
1959 and 1960 Heavy Farm, one of which being the 7th plate issued
1988 Heavy Truck FA
1946 Farm
The rest of the plates I don't know what they were, so I really won't go into detail because I just don't remember most of the plates I bought there.
Over August I picked up lots of plates, including:
1980 Heavy Truck PA, DC
1950 Truck
1954 Farm 4 digit, 1937 Farm 5 digit
1957 Passenger
2010, 2011 Mobile Home (one has an APR sticker along with the APR stamp)
1980 Antique
1967 Heavy Truck XC (With a private lessor supplemental plate still attatched!)
2009 Truck
1978 Heavy Truck DA
1978 unknown series trailer (CZ trailer? Nobody knows what it is?)
1958 Heavy Truck (finally have a plate for my Heavy Truck tab!)
1962 Heavy Truck
1982 Truck
1972 Farm
1973 Heavy Farm S weight class (the heaviest weight class)
2018 Tractor
2017 Tractor MS
2009 Tractor with left side cut off, either FS 979, GS 979, or HS 979
1977 Truck
1977 Farm
1994 Truck AG
Various sticker mania plates
1981 Minnesota Trailer
1967 Manitoba Tab
1998 Illinois Semi Trailer
1980 Minnesota Truck (sticker mania)
I dropped probably around $300 on license plates this summer, and I've got another $150 or so of license plates and tabs waiting for me.
What have I done...
But then again, that's nothing compared to me dropping $200 on a dumb project that nobody cares about. If anyone cares they only care to bully me about it, because people on the internet have nothing better to do than bully people for hobbies.
I downloaded images from just the people who have granted me permission to use their photos from just the Wisconsin license plate group for just one month. Sounds pretty restrictive and simple, right?
Well, a manageable 100 or so images quickly turned into almost 500 images from one person alone. And you want to guess what is taking up most of those images? You guessed it: Bicycle plates!
This edit goes out to you, Mr. Johnson.
I've been hard at work on this website lately. I finally got a laptop so I can actually work on this site, so naturally I'm gonna go overboard and spend way too much time on my site. Most of the work I've done has been finishing the color cycle tables to 2024, and adding the bridges and text on multiyear bases, while also adding pages here and there, including the general stickers and color cycle pages, which currently sit as blank pages with placeholder content until I work on them more.
One thing I've been doing has been editing photos from my camera. If you don't know, I've had thousands of images that needed to be added to my website from my camera, which I didn't add because I didn't have a device that accepted full size SD cards (Chromebooks are trash). If I wanted to add images, I had to ask my mom for her full size SD card to USB adapter, then ask her to use the computer to do photo work, which 2 hours doesn't go very far when you have thousands of images to edit.
Well, I've edited maybe 20-50 photos, while I've combed through the images and removed duplicates and misshots (with the exception of some shots that I missed miserably - I will be making memes out of those and posting them online). At first there was over 1,000 images on my SD card that I copied to my computer, then I combed through all the images and removed images I knew for sure were useless for my website. At the moment there are around 500 images that I need to go and edit (yay).
I'm gonna have to break off the job into chunks and do some switching here and there to prevent myself from burning out. The last time I had thousands of images to edit, I got burnt out and neglected adding images for almost a year.
So far I'm editing images from the Grateful Shed back in 2019, but with my new photo editor. In case you haven't noticed, the images I took there were slapped on a Google document, cropped and tilted, then screenshotted, and the images on their own were very crooked. My new photo editor is capable of distorting the image in such a way that the plate appears for the most part straight. It takes some messing around to get the plate looking normal again, and while this distortion process does make the plate appear slightly unnatural if you are fully aware of the process, it's still better than having super crooked images that take up half the screen with their crookedness.
Jeez. It's been a while.
The last known update to this website was on June 25, which I added some Heavy Truck license plate ranges from my images I had been taking on my camera for the last month. I didn't even bother finishing adding the citations because I was working from my tablet (I will call it a stone tablet powered by potatoes because trying to work on that thing was horrible).
Since then, there have been a lot of license plate spottings and images I've taken that need to be added.
So, now I have up to thousands of images to add. I gotta find a place to host all the images because I am limited to how many images I can have. While the limit is 30,000 different "inodes" (which is basically just different file paths, for example a folder and an image would be 2 inodes I believe), the daily hit limit is a measly 50,000. A "hit" is a file load from this server, so that means that a page with 1,000 images would take up 1/50th of my daily hits. and that's a lot when multiple people may browse my site at any given time and obsessively refresh the pages.
Or maybe I could just pay the $50 a year to host my website on the proper platform and not have to worry about this. But then again that's $50 that could be put towards other things, like license plates, college stuff, groceries, etc...
Either way I've got a lot of work to catch up on. I'm running on little to no sleep at all at 9PM so don't expect major changes just yet. I just got my new laptop and I'm testing it out to see if it works for what I need (coding, Microsoft Office, etc.)
Also, a major announcement:
The motiviation for out of state license plate research has resurged for completely unknown reasons. Either way, I've been taking lots of images of various license plate stickers, and I'm not sure what the significance is of different sticker styles because I don't research current license plates of different states at the moment.
This is a massive undertaking researching out of state plates. My expertise at the moment is mostly limited to Wisconsin license plates, as I've studied them in some way or another since 2012. My current level of research started in summer 2018 as I was riding my bicycle in town, memorizing plate numbers on construction vehicles in my town, while also memorizing and recording sticker colors.
Another major announcement, I now know all but two insert sticker colors! That's right, the only two unknown sticker colors are 1st quarter 1966 and 1978, which the former of the bunch has the background color known. 3rd quarter 1978 is white on red and June 2013 is white on green (like I predicted), while June 2022 and September 2022 sticker colors have been found since I last updated this site, which are black on mint and black on pinkish red respectively.
If you've been looking at my site, there are a lot of broken images. And when I say there's a lot of broken images, I mean there's a LOT of broken images.
My images are broken for various reasons. Some images were hosted on my old coding platform and I just haven't gotten around to transferring the images from my old site to my new site. Some images were hosted on a Google site that I made a while ago as a test, and for some reason on some devices the images don't load. Another wave of images were added to a separate site I made on the same coding platform that I coded my old site on, and I guess they block hotlinking because they don't want people like me using their platform for photo storage.
There's a reason why there's a lack of images on this site. It's not because I don't have access to many images. Even though I have access to thousands of images that I could potentially use on my website... I only have a few hundred images on my site.
The real reason why I don't add images is because adding images is tedious, irritating, and overall unenjoyable compared to coding my site and researching serial ranges.
I have to first get the image, whether it be download it off of the Facebook group (with permission of course), take the image at a license plate event, or download the image from other site with permission as usual. I then have to transfer most images I have from my tablet to my Chromebook, which is a nightmare all on its own. I have to find the images then copy them to my SD card 20 times because my OCD makes me copy and uncopy images a million times, then I have to take my tablet out of its protective case, which involves taking off rubber and unclasping a plastic case, then I have to take the SD card out and hope the SD card don't yeet itself to the other corner of my room, then I have to get the image, and Facebook images I have to upload the image to this image editor I use, crop the image down to the single plate, then I have to save the image then I have to reopen the image and use free distort to straighten the image because every image I have access to is pretty much at an angle that's really awkward to display on my site. I then have to download that image, then I have to upload that image to my website then finally link the image to the page and then hope that I'm not using all my inodes (basically file paths, so an image would take up 1 inode each) and hits (which are file loads).
Maybe that's why I haven't added a single image since September. Because it's such an annoyance to add images.
I'm planning on adding more images soon, but don't count on the images coming before I graduate from high school.
For a while, I would just try to memorize the license plate numbers I saw on road trips and write them down on my website when I got on the internet.
Unfortunately, my memory is crap, so I kept forgetting important license plate numbers. A lot.
So, starting in early 2020, I wrote down my license plate numbers I found on pretty much whatever I had laying around, be it a coloring book my sister brought in the car, signs I put down in Minecraft, or even wrappers from my sister's toys. Needless to say, this was not a very practical or effective solution, as I frequently lost my notes, including a J weight class trailer plate that I was really excited to see.
In June 2020, I bought a miniature notebook to write down my license plate numbers I saw on road trips. It was a great solution for a little while... that is until the notebook started to fall apart. I lost so many license plate notes, unfortunately.
From December to about a couple weeks ago I did what I used to do, I just wrote the numbers down on whatever I had laying around, even using a napkin and a container for popcorn chicken to write down license plate numbers with a marker I found in the car.
I recently got a composition notebook for all my license plate numbers, so I'm hopeful that the notebook don't fall apart like the spiral notebook did. Though knowing how much the notebook goes through on a normal basis the notebook will probably fall apart too.
I noticed the hologram changed in late 2016. I didn't know why the hologram changed, or if it meant anything, but I noticed the new hologram. Fast forward to 2019 and I got a pair of seven digit passenger plates, AAE-7902 or something like that. I looked very closely, and I noticed that there was some rainbowing of the sheeting, which is what I'd expect with an Avery plate.
You see, when Avery sheeting is bent, it creates a rainbowing effect. And I knew that Avery sheeting had that effect and that the sheeting was usually shinier than 3M sheeting. So I found out that the sheeting changed to Avery sheeting without me noticing. Many other collectors immediately knew the sheeting change, and being the king of minor Wisconsin license plate variations, I feel like I kinda was a little late to notice the sheeting change.
That's one reason why it's hard to determine sheeting changes. I didn't know the sheeting changed, and as such I missed out on four years of research. I know that the current high for 3M sheeting for passenger plates is 705-ZCU and the low for Avery sheeting is 206-ZCZ, and for truck plates it is MT8889 and MX2809 respectively.
Another thing making it difficult to study the sheeting is that most of the sheeting breakoff points I know either by looking at a license plate from a foot away in a parking lot, from someone else's collection, or from numbers reported before 2016. That's because if you are driving by a license plate you aren't going to see the hologram unless you are at a certain angle, which is very rare in a driveby.
On March 13, which was this Saturday, I went to another license plate meet. The first time I went to the license plate meet we left at 9:00 AM and people didn't stay much longer, and I woke up around 9:00AM and freaked out becuase I thought we were very late for the meet and that everyone would have left the meet by the time we would get there. We made it to the meet luckily.
My dad grabbed a lot of money for the meet because my parents owed me $82, $50 from Amazon gift cards they bought off of me, $20 from a deal we made, and $12 lotto tickets.
I went around and quickly looked at license plates, and then picked the plates up. I took some pictures of license plates, but not very many images were taken.
Of the plates that I grabbed, I picked up:
1956 Farm
1958 Farm
1967 Truck (C)
1969 Truck
1972 Heavy Truck 1st quarter
1982 Motor Home
1987 Semi Trailer
1987 Semi Trailer (I picked up this plate for a dollar before I found a stack of license plates for $3 that included one of these plates)
1989 Heavy Truck EA 52
1994 Semi Trailer (nonreflective)
1994 Semi Trailer (Avery sheeting)
1994 Semi Trailer (3M sheeting)
1998 Motor Home September
2009 Heavy Truck (GD)
2010 Truck
2011 Truck
2012 Truck
2017 Apportioned May
2018 Apportioned September
If you search for something specific like "Wisconsin dealer license plates" then you will eventually find my website. But it is very low on the search results.
I had to go to the Google search console, download a verification file, upload the file to my website, then wait a day for Google to crawl my website (and somehow crawl my old websites too). And now I have to go and add keywords to every page (I hear that they aren't used anyway but it doesn't hurt to add a few keywords).
At least my site is finally on Google. That way I don't have to keep promoting my website everywhere I go.
Click this link. Look at the address. What the..?
So I noted to the license plate group that the Wisconsin page was nonfunctional for some reason. I thought maybe the code that my old coding platform used broke my site, but other pages that hadn't been converted worked fine. Then I thought maybe the files didn't upload right, so I reuploaded the files. That didn't work either, so I started playing with the file paths to see if for some reason the file paths messed up.
Don't ask me how, but my Wisconsin page's address is http://wisconsinlicenseplates.net//Wisconsin.html.
There is no known explanation for this.
Welp, I've got a lot of pages to fix the broken links.
I am planning on moving my website very soon, within the next month. I can't stand my coding platform anymore. It's been a nightmare to manage pictures and I haven't added a single image since before I went to the license plate meet. And the entire redesign of the website was the final straw. I hated the platform as it was, but after the redesign with the irritating automatic addition of closing paranthesis, quotation marks, and curly brackets for CSS, the platform became untolerable.
For a long time I've used Code.org's studio to code and host my website. I was fine with the platform for a little while, but as my website grew the load time became unbearable to the point that I would pin my website tab to make sure that the tab didn't close. Every time my teachers would focus browse me (which means that they close my tabs out because they don't trust me to work even though I am a high schooler) I would freak out because it took so long to load my website. I started pruning images off my website recently (which is why some images are broken) and it still isn't enough. And after the redesign I keep getting a notification that the maximum amount of files has been reached. I purged a bunch of images off my website and it still isn't enough.
Another irritating thing is that the platform doesn't support folders, so I have to scroll through a huge list of images before I can edit a single webpage.
Before the redesign of the coding platform I had to use the same platform to code in JavaScript. When I used that platform I was irritated at the constant automatic addition of closing parenthesis and quotation marks. Why? Why can't I say that I don't want to have automatic closing tags? Why can't I customize my experience with this platform? There is no customization whatsoever. I know this site is meant for schools. But with the option of making your own outside of class projects (which is what I do with this current website), why would you force annoying settings upon me? One thing I hated with the automatic closing tags is that there would always be an extra tag because they decided to add the tag for me because I can't add a quotation mark for some reason. My entire code goes pink if I miss a quotation mark, do you really think I would forget a quotation mark?
I'm planning on moving my website to a new domain, which I will likely register my domain as wisconsinlicenseplates.net. (at the moment the link doesn't work because the domain isn't registered right now.) If you are wondering why I chose .net instead of .com, let me explain:
I will still update serial ranges, but I will stop updating the serial ranges soon as I move my website.
I bought another license plate from eBay a couple days ago. It was a March 2008 tractor plate, MS 2114, and it was $15. I was only able to buy the plate because my parents had leftover money from eBay shopping for license plates for me, and they gave me the $9 that was left over. I used the other $7 out of my money, which was a good price for a tractor plate like that.
I also bought some license plate tabs from a license plate collector. I bought a pair of what I think is 1948 Heavy Truck tabs, and I also picked up a 1952 farm tab for $3 more. It was a non-passenger tab for a run of plates I was building so I couldn't say no to the tab for just $3.
See blog posts from: 2023-2024 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018