Two years with Giuliettas: The State of the Union

It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since I started giuliettas.com.  It’s mostly been a lot of fun-to-do yet challenging work and I’ve had my productivity issues, my ups and downs of mood, funds and time, but through it all I have kept my momentum, mainly through the encouragement of the friends I’ve made through comments and emails… they get me through the days when I wonder what I am bothering to do this for.   I renewed my domain name, paid to have it link to the site and am due to renew my Flickr pro account next week, so rest assured, you will be able to enjoy another year of giuliettas.com. 

Where it all began.

 Hello, my name is ‘Ghia Giulietta Sprint’.  Anyone ever seen me in person?  Did I exist or am I just a small black and white jpeg?

By the time this is published I will have had about 275,000 visitors to my 417 posts, with 213 of those posts being cars on the Market.  Not bad for 2 years work.  I don’t really keep track of the traffic through my Flickr pages, but the addition of all the pictures of Giulietta’s from my hard drive earlier this year has generated a lot of interest.  I see it being invaluable in the years to come as a source of guidance in research for repair and restoration activities.  If anyone wants pictures of their cars (please?) added to it, email them to me and I’ll get them where they belong.

I have had a lot of cars come and go through my care but my core group –the Giulietta Sprint, Giulietta SS and Fiat 124 sedan have stuck around and a lot of work has gotten done on them.  If you read my announcement recently that I bought a Giulia SS, and have paid attention to my cycles, you probably are expecting a shake-up of sorts and I have to admit you are probably right.  We’ll see how it goes when the new comer arrives.   I have had some interest in the Giulietta SS but part of me says to hang on to both -that in the years ahead I will be glad I did from both the standpoint of benefitting from all the work I’ve done and because the values on these cars can only go up.  Also, I am playing with the idea of writing a book about SS’s and having one of each of the common ones to work on and write about is probably a good idea.

How you used to find them.  Thanks to who ever it was who posted this on the Alfa BB.

I had a chat with a friend on the Snowball and he congradulated me for keeping the blog going and asked me where things were headed.  I responded that I have a lot of organizational work I want to do on the site to make the Production and Register functionality more accessible, and that I want to get back to my earlier approach to ‘how to’ type posts, with less self-directed sarcasm and more  pictures, clarity and ‘end of project’ results. 

Another conversation came up around my Market posts, namely that, since I have a pretty good pile of data to mine these days, I should have a rating system for cars on the market.  The work to make this happen is not trivial, but I think it can be done.  There are some readers I can leverage to fine tune it once it’s up and running.  A nice thing about doing this is I can add more objectivity to the write ups.  Look for posts about this in the near future.

Steering the ship.

On this note, if anyone out there wants to contribute Market Reports I’d love the help -any post about Giuliettas will be considered for that matter.   I know, a blog is a personal thing, but there must be someone out there who would be a good fit.  Don’t do it for me, do it for the cars. 

I’m going to get another batch of T-shirts made since I have one left and have had a lot of requests.  If anyone wants one let me know so I know how many to make.  If you requested on elast time and didn’t follow through -I forgive you, don’t let it keep you from stepping up again.

Our logo as found on our popular shirts.

Last note: all you out there who have Giuliettas -I want to see you out on the road using them.  I’ve seen big email threads on the 750/101 group about originality versus modified, matching numbers versus not etc, but I say as long as you are using and maintaining the cars nothing else really matters.  What good is having an umbrella if you never go out in the rain?

Vroom!!!

See you on the road.  And as Laurence always says: ‘keep the rev’s up!’