The Dongfeng Aeolus AX7. But just where does Aeolus sit when it comes to indexing in Autocade?
This is something that might have to come out in the wash, and it might take years.
I think we can all agree that Ssangyong is a marque or a make, and Korando is a model. Never mind that there’s currently a basic Korando, the Korando Sports (a pick-up truck) and a Korando Turismo (a people mover), none of which really have much connection with the other, name aside. We are as comfortable with this as we once were with the Chevrolet Lumina and Lumina APV, the Ford Taurus and Taurus X, and the Toyota Mark X and Mark X Zio. So far so good.
But when do these drift into being sub-brands? BMW calls i a sub-brand, but as far as cataloguing in Autocade goes, it doesn’t matter, as the model names are i3 or i8 (or a number of ix models now coming out). Audi’s E-Tron is its parallel at Ingolstadt, and here we do have a problem, with a number of E-Tron models unrelated technically. It’s not like Quattro, where there was the (ur-) Quattro, then Quattro as a designation, and everyone accepted that.
Similarly, the Chinese situation can be far from clear.
Many years ago, GAC launched a single model based on the Alfa Romeo 166 called the Trumpchi. So far so good: we have a marque and model. But it then decided to launch a whole bunch of other cars also called Trumpchi (the original became the Trumpchi GA5, to distinguish it from at least eight others). Some sources say Trumpchi is a sub-brand, others a brand in its own right, but we continue to reference it as a model, since the cars have a GAC logo on the grille, just as the GAC Aion EVs have a GAC logo on the grille. (The latter is also not helped with Chinese indices tending to separate out EVs into ‘New Energy Vehicle’ listings, even when their manufacturers don’t.)
I feel that we only need to make the shift into calling a previous model or sub-brand a brand when it’s obvious on the cars themselves. That’s the case with Haval, when it was very clear when it departed from Changcheng (Great Wall). Senia is another marque that spun off from FAW: it began life with the FAW symbol on the grille, before Senia’s own script appeared on the cars.
The one that confounds me is Dongfeng Aeolus, which was make-and-model for a long time, but recently Aeolus has displaced the Dongfeng whirlwind on the grille of several models. We have them currently listed in Autocade with Dongfeng Aeolus as a new marque, since there’s still a small badge resembling the whirlwind on the bonnet. The Dongfeng Aeolus AX7 retains the whirlwind, but has the Aeolus letters prominently across the back, but to muddle it up, the AX7 Pro has the new Aeolus script up front. These can’t be two different marques but the visual cues say they are.
Maybe we’ll just have to relegate Aeolus back to model status, and do what Ssangyong does with the Korando (or Changcheng with the Tengyi). These are the things that make life interesting, but also a little confusing when it comes to indexing an encyclopædia.
This was an unusual car to have as the 4,400th on Autocade: the Rosengart Ariette.
I did know the 4,400th was coming up since it wasn’t that long ago that Autocade passed 22 million page views, and I checked the stats. But I like to think this would still have been the motor that made it up even I was unaware of the number, since I had done plenty of Chinese vehicles of late and wanted a change.
I suspect the December–January period is a big one for Autocade generally since there’s less news at Lucire coming in, and there’s a bit more time to work on hobbies—even if there’s also plenty of housework to keep me occupied.
I’m grateful to Carfolio for checking up the Rosengarts for me, since they were quicker at getting models online, and it’s as trustworthy a source as you’ll find anywhere on the motoring web. Unlike Wikipedia in English, which has yet another inaccuracy with regard to these models.
Note: the above image is from Piston Collection, and not the one used in Autocade. It is a condition of reuse that I post the following, and it’s nice to give another motoring enthusiast a shout-out anyway: ‘Ceci est un article «presslib», c’est-à-dire libre de reproduction en tout ou en partie à condition que le présent alinéa soit reproduit à sa suite. Pistoncollection.com est le site sur lequel Sylvain Devaux s’exprime quotidiennement et livre une analyse pointue du monde de la collection automobile. Merci de visiter mon site. Vous pouvez vous abonner gratuitement à la lettre d’information quotidienne sur www.pistoncollection.com.’
As I begin this blog post, Autocade has just crossed the 22 million page-view barrier, at 22,000,040. I had estimated we would get there on Sunday, and as it’s just ticked over here in New Zealand, I was right.
We have 4,379 models in the database, with the Bestune B70, in its third generation, the most recent model added. I’m grateful it’s a regular car—not yet another crossover, which has been the usual story of 2020 whenever I added new models to the site.
As crossovers and SUVs were once regarded as niche models, historical ones weren’t put up in any great haste, so I can’t always escape them just by putting up models from the past. However, there are countless sports and supercars to go up, so maybe I’ll need to add them in amongst the SUVs to maintain my sanity and happiness. These high-riding two-box vehicles are incredibly boring subjects stylistically.
It’s a stroke of luck, then, to have the B70: Bestune’s sole saloon offering now in amongst an entire range of crossovers. The saloons are the niche vehicles of 2020–1. It’s a stylish motor, too: Cadillac looks for a middle-class price. Admittedly, such close inspirations haven’t deserted China altogether, but this is, in my mind, no worse than Ford pretending its 1975 US Granada was a Mercedes-Benz for the masses. It’s not going to get GM’s lawyers upset. And unlike the Granada, the B70 is actually a fairly advanced car, with refinement now on par with a lot of joint-venture models coming out of China.
You know the drill to track Autocade’s growth:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months for 20th million)
October 2020: 21,000,000 (three months for 21st million)
January 2021: 22,000,000 (three months for 22nd million)
Not a huge change in the rate, then: for the past year we can expect roughly a million page views every three months. The database has increased by 96 model entries, versus 40 when I last posted about the million milestones.
In other publishing news, Jody Miller has managed to get an interview with Rachel Hunter. Her story is on Lucire today, and I’m expecting a more in-depth one will appear in print later in 2021. It’s taken us 23 years (not that we were actively pursuing): it’s just one of those things where it took that long for our paths to cross. Both Rachel and Lucire are Kiwi names that are arguably more noticed abroad than in our countries of birth, and I suppose it’s like two compatriots who travel to different countries. You don’t always bump into one another.
I end this blog post with Autocade’s views at 22,000,302.
Either something is interfering with Mediawiki or I’ve reached the limit with the software after 4,300-odd entries on Autocade. Which is highly unlikely as the same software runs Wikipedia.
For the first time ever I noticed this in the footer:
This is how a page with no views looks. Once it nets a few views, a count appears (‘1 view’). Except for the first time in 12 years, this page, which has been viewed multiple times—including by me as I reloaded it to see if I could get the count started—will not show a count.
This is only happening, as far as I can tell, on the newest page, though the counts on other pages have stayed static despite reloads (including leaving the page and returning).
The statistics’ page on Autocade doesn’t always update when I reload pages, either, which makes me wonder if the count to the next million is going to be accurate.
Anyone else come across this error?
It’s funny that software that has run for 12 years one way decides not to do so any more, without any change in the back end.
I have noticed, however, that Disqus is doing some odd things, with the ‘Also on Autocade’ box showing ‘View source’ links that the general public is not permitted to see. Which means it’s following me. Is that altering how the pages behave? It’s the first time that that’s happened, too.
And something is making sure the ads don’t show up, and it’s not me, since I never use an ad blocker, and Privacy Badger is turned off on my own sites. The browser has updated, but I’ve checked and the in-built ad blocker is switched off.
A very quick note, probably more for me than anyone else: the 4,300th model went up on Autocade tonight. It was slightly deliberate, since I checked the stats for the site to see we were up to 4,299. I’ve a folder of models to be added, and I admit I scrolled down a little to see what piqued my interest—having said that, it’s what I usually do anyway. But there was a desire not to add yet another two-box crossover (had enough of those for a while) or any model that would lead me to be obsessed about a full line (DAF 33, anyone?). As the 1980–4 Pontiac Phoenix is already on the site, the 1978–9 entry went up. (Yes, I disagree with Wikipedia, which has Phoenixes starting in 1977, which is true, but it was mid-year, it was officially part of the Ventura line, and Phoenix doesn’t appear in the 1977 full-line brochure.) Wikipedians can do it their way, and I’ll do it mine.
At some point I’ll add the Oldsmobile Omega for 1975–9 and we’ll have the X-cars for those years all up.
Above: The 4,283rd model entered into Autocade: the mostly forgotten Isuzu Bellel.
A few days ago, Autocade hit 21 million page views. It was pretty uneventful even for me, since the site hasn’t been updated too much since the 20 millionth page view. Thanks to COVID-19, I’ve been quite busy and haven’t contributed to the site nearly as much as I would want to, and it’s not helped by the industry churning out yet another boring two-box crossover that looks the same as the last boring two-box crossover.
I am happy that we achieved this milestone in three months with the addition of only 40 models over the last million views (the encyclopædia is up to 4,283 models). That’s quite pleasing, though I wonder if that’s down to COVID-19. In July there wasn’t much of an increase at all, which made me think then that the coronavirus had not affected readership.
Once again, here’s the usual copy-and-paste-and-add to track the site’s growth.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months for 20th million)
October 2020: 21,000,000 (three months for 21st million)
Not the fastest pace of growth—that would be the million to get to 18,000,000 in December 2019—but healthy all the same. Thank you to all the readers who have been using the site!
Above: The 4,243th model entered into Autocade, now on 20,008,500 page views: the Maxus G50.
Autocade’s passed the 20,000,000 page-view mark, sitting on just over 20,008,000 at the time of writing, on 4,243 models entered (the Maxus G50 is the newest), an increase of 101 models over the last million views.
As it’s the end of July, then it’s taken just under four months for the site to gain another million page views. It’s not as fast as the million it took to get to 18,000,000or the previous million milestone.
To be frank, the last few months have been a little on the dull side for updating Autocade. No Salon de Genève meant that while there were new models, they weren’t all appearing during the same week at one of the world’s biggest car shows. And it’s not all that interesting talking about another SUV or crossover: they’re all rather boxy, tall, and unnecessary. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that we have certain behaviours that aren’t really helping our planet, and surely selfish SUVs are a sign of those?
I don’t begrudge those who really use theirs off-road, but as a statement of wank, I’m not so sure.
So many of them seem like the same vehicle but cut to different lengths, like making cake slices and seeing what remains.
During the lockdown, I put on a bunch of older models, too, which made the encyclopædia more complete, but I imagine those who come to the site wanting data on the latest stuff might have been slightly disappointed.
It does mean that we didn’t see much of an increase in traffic during lockdown here, but the opposite.
As is the tradition on this blog, here was how the growth looked.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million, from first week of October to December 27)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million, from December 27 to April 9)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months, from April 9 to July 26)
Unlike the last entry on this subject, the Alexa ranking stats have been improving, despite the slow-down in traffic.
For a while, we’ve been thinking about how best to facelift the Lucire website templates, to bring them into the 2020s. The current look is many years old (I’ve a feeling it was 2016 when we last looked at it), which in internet terms puts this once-cutting edge site into old-school territory.
But what’s the next step? When I surf the web these days, so many websites seem to be run off one of several templates, and there aren’t many others out there. After you scroll down past the header, everything more or less looks the same: a big single-column layout with large type.
I know we have to make things responsive, and we haven’t done this properly, by any means. The CSS will have to be reprogrammed to suit 2020s requirements. But I am reminded of when we adopted many of the practices online publishers do today, except we did them nearly two decades ago.
Those of you who have been with us a long time, and those who might want to venture into the Wayback Machine, might know that we provided “apps” for hand-held devices even then. We offered those using Palm Pilots and the like a small, downloadable version of the Lucire news pages. We had barely any takers.
Then Bitstream (if I recall correctly) came out with tech that could reduce pages to a lower resolution and narrower pixel width so those browsing on smaller devices could do so, and those of us publishing for larger monitors no longer needed to do a special version.
So that was the scene 20 years ago. Did apps, no one cared; and eventually tech came out that rendered it all unnecessary. It’s why I resisted making apps today, because I keep expecting history to repeat itself. I can’t be the only one with a memory of the first half of the 2000s. As a non-technical person, I expect there’d be something like that Bitstream technology today. Maybe there is. I guess some browsers have a reader mode, and that’s a great idea. And if we want to offer that to our readers, it can’t be too hard to find a service that we can point modern smartphone users to, and they can browse all sites to their hearts’ content.
Except I know, as with so many tech things, that it isn’t that easy, that in fact it’s all so much harder. Server management hasn’t become easier in 2020 compared with 2005, all as the computing industry loses touch with everyday people like me who once really believed in the democratization of technology and bridging the digital divide.
Back to the templates. I wrote on NewTumbl yesterday, ‘Remember when we could surf the web pretty easily and find amazing new sites, and creative web designs, as people figured out how best to exploit this medium? These days a lot of websites all look the same and there’s far less innovation. Have we settled into what this medium’s about and there’s no need for the same creativity? I’m no programmer, so I can’t answer that, but it wasn’t that long ago we could marvel at a lot of fresh web designs, rather than see yet another site driven by the same CMS with the same single-column responsive template. Or people just treat a Facebook page or an Instagram feed as their “website”, and to heck with making sure it’s hosted on something they have control over.’
And that’s the thing: I haven’t visited any sites that really jumped out at me, that inspires me to go, ‘What a great layout idea. I must see if I can do something similar here.’ My very limited programming and CSS design skills aren’t being challenged. This is a medium that was supposed to be so creative, and when I surf, after finding a page via a search engine, those fun moments of accidental discovery don’t come any more. The web seems like a giant utilitarian information system, which I suppose is how its inventor conceived it, but I feel it could be so much more. Maybe the whole world could even get on board a fair, unbiased search engine, and a news spidering service that was current and didn’t prioritize corporate media, recognizing that stories can be broken by independents. Because such a thing doesn’t really exist in 2020, even though we had it in the early 2000s. It was called Google, and it actually worked fairly. No search engine with that brand name strikes me as fair today.
I am, therefore, unsure if we can claim to have advanced this medium.
Again, proof that each 100th vehicle on Autocade isn’t planned: the 4,200th is the second-generation Mazda Premacy, or Mazda 5 in some markets, a compact MPV that débuted 15 years ago. If it were planned, something more significant would have appeared.
I know MPVs aren’t sexy but they remain one of the most practical ways to ferry people around when it comes to the motor car. In terms of space efficiency and the percentage of the car’s length dedicated to passenger accommodation, they remain one of the best. And with the old Premacy, they handled really well, too.
It must be the times we live in that people demand inefficient crossovers and SUVs instead, and that is a shame. Maybe with the pandemic people will re-evaluate what’s important, and signalling that you have some inadequacy with a large vehicle might fall down the pecking order. MPVs were usually cleverly designed, and the Premacy was no exception—what a shame Mazda, and so many others, are no longer in this market as buyer tastes shifted.
Out of curiosity, why do people visit Autocade? We haven’t had a big jump in visits with COVID-19 (contrary to some other motoring sites), as I imagine encyclopædias aren’t as fun as, say, AROnline, where at least you can reminisce about the British motor industry that was, back in the day when Britain had a functioning government that seemed terrible at the time when no one could imagine how much worse it could get. Obviously we haven’t had as many new models to record, but are they the reason people pop by? Or are the old models the reason? Or the coverage of the Chinese market, which few Anglophone sites seem to do? If you are an Autocade fan reading this, please feel free to let us know why in the comments.
One moan about Facebook. Go on.
Sometimes when I pop in—and that remains rarely—and look at the Lucire fan page, I’ll spot an automated Tweet that has appeared courtesy of IFTTT. It’s had, say, no views, or one view. I think, ‘Since there have been no real interactions with this bot entry, maybe I should delete it and feed it in manually, because surely Facebook would give something that has been entered directly on to its platform better organic reach than something that a bot has done?’
With that thought process, I delete it and enter the same thing in manually.
Except now, as has happened so many times before, the page preview is corrupted—Facebook adds letters to the end of the URL, corrupting it, so that the preview results in a 404. This is an old bug that goes back years—I spotted it when I used Facebook regularly, and that was before 2017. It’s not every link but over the last few weeks there have been two. You then have to go and edit the text to ask people, ‘Please don’t click on the site preview because Facebook is incapable of providing the correct link.’ Now you’re down some views because people think you’ve linked a 404. Not everyone’s going to read your explanation about Facebook’s incompetence. (Once again, this reminds me why some people say I encounter more bugs there than others—I don’t, but not everyone is observant.)
This series of events is entirely counterintuitive because it means that bot activity is prioritized over actual activity on Facebook. Bot activity is more accurate and links correctly. And so we come back to the old, old story I have told many times about Facebook and bots and how the platform is bot city. In 2014, I rang the alarm bells; and I was astonished that in 2019 Facebook claims it had to delete over 5,400 million bot accounts. You should have listened to me then, folks—unless, of course, bots are part of the growth strategy, and of course they are.
So, when feeding in links, remember this. Facebook: friendly to bots, not to humans. It’s probably not a bad way to approach their site anyway.
I’ve looked at my May blogging stats going back a decade (left sidebar, for those on the desktop skin) and it’s always quieter. I blog less. I wonder why this is. The beginning of hibernation? The fact that less interesting stuff’s happening in late autumn as the seasons change?
A 1950s German microcar (the Champion 400) is a nice change from the massive modern SUV
It’s a cinch that Autocade will hit 19 million page views this week. At the time of writing, there are fewer than 15,000 views to go. The last millionth milestone was expected on December 26, but I believe I was ultimately a day out (i.e. December 27). Conservatively, Autocade will get to 19 million on April 9, which means we got this latest million in a shade over three months. I’ll update these details if things change. I wanted to mark it early since I have a busy week ahead (plus for a lot of the other milestones, I was late!).
Despite this fairly constant page view count, Autocade’s Alexa ranking has plummeted like mad after a healthy rise over the last half of 2019. In all these years I’m still not certain how it’s all calculated, and they do say the lower your ranking, the less accurate it gets. Therefore, as it falls, you know it’s also getting less accurate!
The site is on 4,142 entries.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million) March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million) January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million) September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million) May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million) October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million) March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million) February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million) June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million) January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million) May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million) September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million) February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million) June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million) October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million) December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million, from first week of October to December 27)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million, from December 27 to April 9)
It’s not a record increase—that was the 18th million—but it’s still reasonably healthy and shows that traffic is continuing on an upward curve overall, even if Alexa doesn’t think so.
