I don’t know how much more abundantly clear we can make things on our sites when we say, for instance, at Lucire: ‘We receive multiple enquiries from SEO or “outreach” companies enquiring about paid or guest posts each day, and if you fall into this category, please do not contact us: it’s going to be […]
Month: February 2025
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
Lucire receives second honour from Luxlife; Autocade reaches 41 million page views

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 […]
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X-odus
This was already in the air in 2019: Platforms can run their course and to me, Twitter had already jumped the shark by 2019. By then I had had three years on the fediverse, two on Mastodon. Who needed Twitter? And who needs it now? You may also like There is no point […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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