Cosa sta succedendo in Italia?

A few months ago, the hit-rate on this blog really took off. I thought it was because we had started working on a project that was of wider interest than the usual fare of Volkswagon bay window bus and the MGB. To be fair, we have documented our work on a few other cars: the Jetta, a couple A4's, a subbie and, of course, Jaws the Jeep. We have done little things to help out friends along the way too, and we haven't really documented those, but that's not really important.

Back to a few months ago, I thought there was a new interest because of the 280ZX project. This theory was fueled by a considerable uptick in overall blog interest, but more from the hit-rate those particular postings were getting. That behavior is not holding, however, and I'm seeing higher hits on all postings. Am I getting more interesting? No. Are my posts really appealing to that much broader an audience? I doubt it. So, with the assumption that my posts are no more interesting nor widely appealing, I started looking into the numbers a little bit more.

This all brings me to the title of the post: Cosa sta succedendo in Italia? or "what's going on in Italy?"

The numbers indicate that I am getting a very unusual spike in traffic from Italy. Based on the sharp peak (it looks like a tack sitting on it's head), I'm inclined to believe that it is a bot of some kind spider'ing the blog with 50 or so post views in a span of a few minutes. With all the craziness stemming from the Russian influence on elections and the use of Facebook in that effort, I think everyone is a little more on edge. So, when I saw that usage spike I figured it was a troll-farm thing, but it's not from Russia and frankly this blog doesn't really hit their target content-wise.

The stats collected about where the views come from or what browser is being used are quite literally of no interest to me. I don't look at that. I am interested to know what posts hold interest over time, but just from a curiosity perspective. I don't think it meaningfully influences what I write about. My life drives what I write. If a car breaks, I fix it and then write about it. If my kid buys a car or the family moves or we take a trip somewhere, I write about it. If you were to bring your car over and we work on it, I'll write about it or maybe I won't. I don't know. Yes, that's an open invitation to bring your car over if you need to do something on it, even if it's just a simple oil change.

Anyway, weird post for today, but after months of wondering what's going on this post will serve as the salve to get it out of my system. I love cars. I love talking to people about cars. But mostly, I love working on them, and even better is working on them with someone else. If the Italian Blog Bot feels the same way, then I absolutely welcome its spidering behaviors. Spread the love, Iron Man. But, if you're trolling for political leanings or how to learn how to best influence an election, you're definitely in the wrong place. We talk cars, not politics here.

Happy May Day-

MGB Emissions Update:
I didn't change the oil because it was clean as honey when I checked it. I guess I changed it before I started all the work on it.
I replaced the spark plugs (they were Champions) with NGK's, and gapped them to .03. The old ones had really wide gaps, but the tips were light-ish colored telling me that the fuel mixture was lean if anything out of normal. I replaced the plug wires, distributor cap and rotor as well.
I routed the oil breather into the top of the air cleaner by drilling a hole in the chrome-top and threading a 1/2" hose joiner into the hole. For hose I used a junk garden hose, which I'll replace with something more suitable later. I was aiming for minimum spend in case MG failed smog miserably. I did a few other little things, that I'll post on later, but that was it for the smog stuff except for getting and hooking up the charcoal fumes thing I mentioned last post.

T and C took a joy ride in MG while I was at work, starting with a trip to the DEQ. MG passed! It passed way better than I could have imagined, actually. For posterity:
hydro-carbons (HC) need to be at or below 220 parts per million (ppm). MG scored a 6ppm.
CO needed to be at or below 1%. MG scored .0201%
With this happy news, I'll be dancing into the DMV to renew my tags. Regular driving of this little British sports-car is just around the corner.