Juanita Somewhere On Hwy 1
Wow quite a lot of crazy has gone down this summer. If you’re a regular fan of the website, you are likely wondering “what the”….? My sincere apologies for the lack of awesome recently. Here’s a few highlights of what’s been going on over the past few months…
- We got hit with a google manual “spam” penalty for a bug in the forum software. If you hadn’t noticed, there was a “beta” version of a forum on here that was designed as a classified system so users could submit their Westys for sale. Somehow a bug in the software created a “black hole” that google didn’t like, and thought it was spam, so the website was kicked out of Google search all together. It took me about a three weeks to go from not being found in Google at all, to being almost back to normal.
- We moved servers! A couple of months ago the server crashed again, and while I’m inquisitive and tech savvy enough to lean how to fix it, this has been a common occurrence over the past couple of years, and I’ve finally thrown in the towel and have moved everything over to WPEngine. While it’s much more restrictive in terms of what I can customize with the site, it’s much more reliable with considerably less maintenance that before, giving me more time to focus on my 9-5 job and add new features to the website. During the process I lost a few posts from the summer, but I’m working on getting them back.
- Transmission, ACK! So, my trusty Juanita finally gave way to the Sudden Death syndrome that every manual transmission vanagon faces before 150k miles. I’ve got a longer write up coming on this when I get the time. The short version of the story, is that I ordered a rebuilt transmission from German Transaxle of Bend and even got a Peloquins. Super stoked on this so far. To date in 2015, the site has made less than $2k, which is a drop in the bucket when compared to the amount of work that I’ve put into it. Due to a new transmission ($4k after clutch, shift linkage, install, peloquins, etc), I had to focus on projects that actually made me money.
In the coming weeks and months I’m hoping to refine this site to point where it becomes considerably more awesome and resourceful than before, it’s just going to take some time and nurturing to get there. Questions, comments and thoughts are always appreciated, leave ’em below or send ’em private style at WestfaliasForSale@gmail.com.
