Mk3Love is proud to announce our first site vendor, Black Forest Industries. BFI offers a complete tuning solution for Mk3s, including engine parts, suspension, lighting, wheels and hard-to-find exterior parts. Their facilities in Cary, NC, include a showroom stocked with the items from their store as well as a shop for installation of everything they sell.

The crew at Black Forest Industries has kicked off the partnership by supplying a $50 BFI gift certificate for the May Dubmodder contest Mk3Love is sponsoring. You’ll see the BFI banner at the top of the site and will continue to see more of them going forward.

Please stop by their store, review some of their parts and make them feel welcome here at Mk3Love.

Now you can find out what it means with Mk3Love’s new CEL Search tool. Just click the link in the nav above or visit http://www.mk3love.com/cel and you’ll be well on your way to a smoother running Mk3.

Once you get to the CEL Search form, just punch in the P-code or diagnostic trouble code (DTC) that your car is throwing and Mk3Love will go right to work, searching our database of trouble codes and descriptions.

You can also do a search by keyword, like “catalyst,” shown below. Mk3Love will pull up all trouble codes associated with “catalyst” and display them along with the corresponding P-code and DTC.

Thanks go out to Scott Phillips for doing the code work for the application and to Jonathan Rowny for providing the list of trouble codes and descriptions.

The next time you pull a CEL, turn to Mk3Love to help you decipher the code.

As we continue to build out the functions and features available on Mk3Love, I’ve been looking for a good search feature that would search the entire site. The forum search is ok if you are searching for forum topics or threads, but what if you are looking for a blog post, a DIY article or a parts review?

Now, with the help of Google Custom Search, I’ve been able to install a custom search engine for the site that will search all of our content, and only our content. The search bar has been integrated into the navigation for the site so you have easy access to it from wherever you are.

Search results are displayed within the Mk3Love template along with relevant Google Ads. Your keywords are highlighted in the results to help you understand where Google is scanning.

As a side note and a reminder, pages may take a few days to be indexed in our search results, similar to the way it takes some time for pages to be indexed by Google.

If you have other questions about how the search works or how to use it, please add a comment to this article. Otherwise, start searching!

A week or two ago we updated to a new design for the website which also included some reorganization of content. One of the things we redid was the reviews section.

Previously members had to email reviews to the staff where they would have to be formatted, a new page would be created and then the review would be published.

Now, the entire reviews section has been redone and it is even easier to review your favorite (and least favorite) parts. We are adding new parts to the database every day and members are free to browse and review as many parts as they like. Once several review have been posted, the site will list out the number of positive and negative reviews as well as the average rating.

Navigating the reviews section can be done in several ways:

• browse parts in alphabetical order via the main listing
• browse parts by category (engine, exterior, suspension, etc.)
• browse parts by tag (2.0 8v, Techtonics Tuning, cup kit, etc.)

So, what are you waiting for? Head into the reviews section and start rating parts! This community is built around your participation and you can help us build the most complete Mk3 parts reviews database in existence.

If you see something missing from our list of parts, please let us know and we’ll get right to work on it.

We’re going through a bit of remodeling, so please ignore the slight mess on the site. Everything is still available (like the forum), but the design itself might appear a bit out of whack until we can get the rest of it in order this weekend.

Thanks for understanding.

If you’re not already using Flickr, sign up today and join the Mk3Love group. I set it up a few days ago and have already added a few pictures.

Add tags to your pictures and add whichever photos you want to the Mk3Love group. You can even comment on photos and start discussions. I’ve added a Flickr button to the main page of this site for quick access to the Mk3Love Flickr album. Check it out!

Congratulations to the members at Mk3Love! We’ve now got over 200 registered members on the forum. I can’t even begin to claim being responsible for this because its you - the Mk3Love user - that is helping spread the word about our site.

Thanks for all of your help in making this site a success. I just finished up a two-day conference on social media marketing hosted by the American Marketing Association and led by Dana VanDen Heuvel and I’m loaded with new ideas about how we can leverage these tools for our benefit. I’m excited to see this site change and grow as we connect with even more enthusiasts from all over the world.

Here’s to our next 200 members. Spread the Love.

It’s been one month since Mk3Love first came online and it seems like we’ve opened the flood gates to Mk3 owners and enthusiasts. We have 115+ members registered on the forum with new people joining each day!

Take a look at these stats on the site:

1,150 unique visitors have visited the site 4,731 times and racked up 70,376 pageviews.

The average number of pageviews per visit is 14.88.

The average time spent per visit is 12 minutes, 18 seconds.

Member Rides is the most popular section of the forum (by pageview count)

I just want to say thank you to all of the people who help moderate the forum, participate on the site and promote it wherever they go. I’ve got some big plans in store for Mk3Love and I can’t wait to see this site grow.

For those of you on the forum that have chosen to be notified via email whenever you receive a new private message, you might be surprised the next time the email comes through. Tonight I installed an upgrade on these notifications so that you can see who sent you the message and what the content of the message was, all without having to leave your inbox.

This new functionality still includes a link to the original message, making it easy to log in and send a quick reply.

This add-on for the forum has taken me a few hours to get everything installed and working correctly, but it looks like I finally got it. Most of the forum add-ons are fairly straight forward to install, but this latest mod was a custom job since I only wanted to add the Google and YouTube feature. The mod I pulled most of the code from had lots of other frivolous features that I didn’t think we needed. So enjoy this new feature and celebrate the fact that I didn’t crash the forum with my coding.

To use this feature, you’ll see the Google Video and YouTube icons right below the message box where you type your post. Just click the icon and then paste in the URL for the video. The coding behind the scenes will stick the proper code into your post to embed the video.

The icons look like this:

You can also just type out the BBcode tags if you are so inclined. For YouTube videos, use [youtube][/youtube] and for Google videos use [GVideo][/GVideo].

Let me know if you experience any problems with the forum. I had to tweak a few things around to get this feature to work.