July 2025 Update < Follow that to the site update, its a lot smaller then this one.
Was a good month so far, not over yet lets not rush away the last few days of July.
Road Trip
I was able to go out and see some really cool rigs in MI, looking for a new or some new caretakers of some special rigs.
When I say "special" it's not in a Holy Grail these are rarest models ever, it's more in the back story and history of the rigs. Was neat to see them in person, it was 3 generations my Dad, myself, and my son all took the ride with my Dad's good friend who owns the rigs. It was good to share that time together.
500th Post
I hit my 500th Post in July, that's pretty neat. When I was at "The Great Willys Picnic" a theme/question that comes up often
"What are your plans for the site", I honestly don't know, I have some projects and goals for the site, working out the bugs a little, it's at times one step forward, pause, one step forward, then half step back, its not a full step back.
Ad's, the necessary evil at times....
Somethings work and others do not. I got my AdSense all sorted and it was cruising right along nicely, it was a lot of trying to balance out the way that the new Auto Ads work vs the page formatting, there were times it killed the site with ad's, then I hit a sweet spot and it I felt it just worked, it was just about 3 clicks for the user to see 20 posts or 2 full pages, that included minimizing one header ad, closing one Vignette thing that was on transition from page to page, and a second minimize a pull down.
You don't get a lot of freedom with the Auto Ad's and Optimization features, they would auto link key words and phrases like Jeep or Willys, even works like "Truck", they would turn blue and the user could click them.
It all worked well, the daily views covered the hosting fees, its not a revenue source but for folks like the local bank I needed to set up a business account and the wanted to know my income sources and it really made it easier letting them know how the Ad revenue worked and paid for the site, but its not 10's of thousands, it should have made about $100 a month.
Then something I guess went wrong and they shut off all ad's on me and suspended the account for invalid activity, they wont exactly say what triggered the penalty box, it looks like its a 30 day deal. I feel what triggered it was when OWF was running slow, I ran that Ping test where it picks a random data center then it tries to reach your site and gives you a score, it was maybe a day after trying that out they suspended the Ad's. My feeling is they thought I was trying to up the revenue with fake links to the site, or a ad bot of sorts. Its also possible it was caused by a 3rd Party hitting the site but was trigging the ad's to uptick. It's just like the current Credit Card situation where the Vendor has the responsibility to protect the card transactions, they require the publisher to enforce the traffic to the site. It's basically impossible to prevent the level of traffic to any site just like the current DDOS event, you can add new software to prevent it and pay for all the add on's, its such a cat and mouse game and it's on the backs of the sites to add all this stuff on.
Never going to figure out what caused the penalty so can't really learn from it and make any changes, I looked at traffic and I don't see anything glaring, if they told us what the issue is I'm sure some folks would just find a work around and ride that fine line. At the end of the day, the site does not need the income, but the income does make it nice to cover costs at times.
Will the ad's return, will see, not in a rush to go back to them, I have turned the Auto Ad's back off again for now, this week I'm in the camp of they won't get my traffic, I will show them! Average views for the month via AdSense was very stable around 1350 views a day, no large swings, some months you will see certain days that have large swings of what's getting captured as real traffic, but its most likely just some bot or crawler. Not to be confused with the real bots and crawlers that are 10x the normal site traffic.
Status Report
Overall its been a good month, site is running well, no major issues to report.
HTTPS Site:

HTTP SIte: (still get a lot of traffic on this, alot is due to folks have links to the site and they are hard coded to the older site is what I have been told.)
The browsers are fun to watch who is coming in from where.
(edit images were identical screenshots)
HTTPS:
HTTP:
Buyer Beware and Lessons Learned Near Miss
Had a few folks reach out with some dedicated postings for sale, which I'm always happy to toss up and cross post, I think they are hit and miss and to get the best visibility you need to cross post in a bunch of place if you choose the public ad's, I still think the direct ask at times is a very good method for selling a WIllys. But I fully understand having the want to just sell to a stranger and never hear about the rig again for some folks that approach is what they are after.
The miss of the month was Andy sent me that very innocent link to the 1963 Willys Delivery hybrid Wagon, with a simple question of
"what do you think this is", I thought it was a hybrid Traveller of sorts, and I forwarded that to a very respected member as a
"hey check this out you have been looking for one of these, maybe take a look", which they did and tossed an offer on it. To paraphrase the reply back was more of
"get off my lawn, I know what I have go away", which was a pretty big red flag for me but in the end it all works out, that turned out to be a good thing for them, bad that I shared a link that was not good.
After that offer was refused, I posted it and then cross posted it here, and we got the Paul Harvey time for the rest of the story, yeah it was a rig that was from a trusted person and through a series of basically cons the rig was being sold under circumstances that were not per the original agreement. Your typical fraud, bait and switch stories, not good. Ad was removed by the seller, I had all the photos and text that's how I do my posts shared them as best possible and will put this one up into the if its too nice and too cheap run, if it's rare and too much run, hard to find that line at times of real and legit.
But I think we did the right thing as soon as we found out about the rig's real history the information on the sale were removed, we did harvest the pictures its a neat rig, will just look at them from afar, and hope the next caretaker is not taken for a ride by this seller.
Thanks for the support and following along, Tim