A decade on AWS stagnated this company

For many years (2002–12), we hosted with a US company that gave us a Plesk front end. That meant we did a lot in-house: create PHP and MySql databases, started up hosting environments for new domains, even managed our own email server. That company eventually opened up an Australian branch and my appointed customer manager […]

Read More… from A decade on AWS stagnated this company



Everyone now sees the rot economy—and we’re beginning to understand what’s behind it

Again, things I’ve been pointing out for over a decade—heck, even over two decades, if you consider early concerns I had over Yahoo!—are now mainstream thought. Ed Zitron’s latest newsletter begins: A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world—watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every […]

Read More… from Everyone now sees the rot economy—and we’re beginning to understand what’s behind it



The public is waking up about Google

Former journalism academic Dan Gillmor writes:   Post by @dangillmor View on Mastodon   People are waking up. Such warnings have been on this blog for over 15 years. The Facebook ones started a bit later when it became evident that they were a bug-filled privacy danger zone, then Twitter. Dan is right: ‘You never […]

Read More… from The public is waking up about Google



Lucire receives second honour from Luxlife; Autocade reaches 41 million page views

Model in brown coat with Luxlife logo on the right.

Two items of good news on the digital end: Luxlife has named Lucire its best digital fashion magazine as part of its Style and Apparel Awards 2024; and Autocade, buoyed by some positive press coverage in Octane for our Year of Cars 2025, has reached the 41 million page-view milestone in just two months. The […]

Read More… from Lucire receives second honour from Luxlife; Autocade reaches 41 million page views





Six refreshed or brand-new company websites since 2021

I am going to give ourselves a pat on the back over the last few years of redesigns and site developments, helped to no small degree by getting all our sites off AWS (Amazon Web Services), which must be the most disempowering, retrograde set-up for hosting I have encountered in 30-plus years of working in […]

Read More… from Six refreshed or brand-new company websites since 2021



OED: capitalize Black American

Yesterday, we had to come to a decision about capitalizing Black when referring to Black Americans, with Black History Month. We adopt Hart’s Rules, which is silent on the matter, but the Oxford English Dictionary, which needs to be referred to in tandem, does capitalize Black American, as of the 2011 revision. We were operating […]

Read More… from OED: capitalize Black American



Testing the search engines: quickest to index, more site: searches

Who was the quickest at indexing any part of Autocade World?   January 17: Google—probably because I had obtained an SSL certificate January 21: Internet Archive, because of ‘certificate transparency’ [January 30: First public mention by me on Facebook to get our members off there] January 31: Bing February 2: Mojeek   Yandex, Baidu, Brave […]

Read More… from Testing the search engines: quickest to index, more site: searches



One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting

  A spot of nostalgia today: another little sheet dug up among all the old paperwork. After desktop publishing came out, the technology wasn’t good enough for everyone to have access to it, so some elements were still contracted out of house. This would have been one of the last times, done by one of […]

Read More… from One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting



Autocade World: the site of the book of the site

  When The Producers—the film with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane—was released, Mel Brooks said it was the film of the musical of the film. Autocade World is the website of the book of the website. My intro on the site gives the raison d’être, but in a nutshell, the new site initially exists to […]

Read More… from Autocade World: the site of the book of the site