This weekend’s milestones at Lucire and Autocade

Autocade’s 4,800th model: the Toyota Urban Cruiser Hyryder.   Stuff that has happened: Lucire has turned 26. Not a huge celebration given we did the quarter-century last year. Looking back, we did it quite well. When we had our 20th and 21st, we intended to mark them through those years, but never really did. It […]

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Hiding a Mediawiki category; Techdirt on its absence from Bing (‘Welcome to the party, pal’)

Since Autocade was reinstalled last year, an errant line appeared on the home page: ‘Category: Pages using DynamicPageList3 parser tag’. The sole page that was listed under this Mediawiki category: the home page. It was very useless information, especially for site visitors. I finally discovered how to hide this, and I’m recording it as the […]

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Autocade reaches 32 million page views

It’s been a slow haul to get to 32 million page views on Autocade, but we are there, in four months rather than the dire five I predicted earlier. The last installation reached 27,647,011 the day before it was unplugged, and the new one has reached 4,362,443, which totals 32,009,454. I don’t think we can […]

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Going to HTTPS need not be this hard

Autocade finally got a secure certificate. The reason it took so long: people who make these things write convoluted instructions to lock out laypeople, or they are simply wrong. The Autocade one is through Let’s Encrypt, which has a confusing website. It linked to instructions for our web host, Hetzner, which were plain wrong. The […]

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Autocade’s top 10, August 2023

  Although Autocade’s viewership has gone down, it’s still fascinating (maybe only to me) to see what the top 10 look like since the site was reinstalled last year.   Toyota Corolla (E210) (7,307 views) Ford Taunus 80 (5,830 views) Daewoo Winstorm (4,943 views) Opel Astra J (4,688 views) Ford Fiesta Mk VII (4,683 views) […]

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How not to buy a website

  Not long ago, someone tried to buy Autocade. In the interests of transparency, I showed them a couple of forward plans we had, and we never heard from them again. I had done a bit of research on the potential buyer and it seems their MO is to buy sites on the cheap, and […]

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Company founders, talk about your businesses and the great work they do

When I launched Lucire into print in 2004, it brought with it some unwelcome elements. On the plus side, it raised the company’s profile and no doubt that helped sales. No one had ever taken a website into print before, with the exception of Yahoo Internet Life, as far as I know. Certainly no one […]

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Twenty years ago, Lucire and United Nations Environment Programme teamed up for a first

  Twenty years ago, the United Nations Environment Programme and Lucire announced their partnership. I look back at how the arrangement came about in 2002–3. At the time, it was unheard of for a mainstream fashion title to make this sort of a commitment to sustainability, but I felt we couldn’t afford not to. Even […]

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Paging Kiwi magazine licensors

  I was surprised to learn that Lucire might be the only magazine brand being licensed from Aotearoa New Zealand at the moment. Unless the search engines are all equally poor at finding local colleagues doing the same thing. There are other publishers I know here—I had a great yarn with a Christchurch colleague in […]

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The summer of ’01: Connecticut

I relayed this to one of my editors after recalling an old colleague we used to work with. He was kind enough to put me up once, pre-9-11, when I was on the US east coast. I was meant to stay with him for a few days and work on some stories together. I envisaged […]

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