Itâs pretty bad that Admiral, which detects whether you are using an ad blocker or not, now advises this with Privacy Badger.
Let me make this very clear: I am not against advertising on websites. I have advertising on our websites.
I am against tracking by people such as Google. And that is all I am blocking: the tracking part. There is a difference.
Frankly, if you need to track in order for your ads to work, then there is something deeply wrong with your model. Youâre actually doing your clients out of exposure.
This goes for the ad networks that work with us, too. If you have Privacy Badger installed and both you and I miss out on ads on our sites, then so be it.
What is so wrong about using the context of the page and delivering ads to suit? Everyone still wins with this model and we donât feel as violated.
So I wonât be disabling Privacy Badger, thanks.
It also means Iâll be happy to charge a premium on advertisers who want to appear on our site because the content is relevantâand because the non-tracked stuff will at least get seen by an engaged public.
At the beginning of July I noticed Facebook had changed its reporting options. Gone is the option labelled âFake accountâ, replaced by âHarmful or spamâ. Itâs a small change that, I believe, is designed to get Facebook off the hook for failing to remove fake accounts: since you canât report them, then you canât say theyâve failed to take them down.
Except, if you choose âHarmful or spamâ, Facebook does acknowledge that your report is for a fake account:
Of course theyâre harmful. Harmful to us regular people who have to pay more and more money to reach our human supporters since the fakes command an increasing amount of fans on our pages, for instance. It isnât harmful for Facebookâs revenue or Zuckerbergâs wealth. So it really depends how you define harmful; one would imagine that a competent court would define it from a consumerâs point of view. Their new group policy, where Facebook has also given up against the bot epidemic, letting fake accounts join public groups, is a disaster. As you can see, the majority of new members to one group I overseeâand where I usually get tips to new bot accountsâare fakes. They’ve used scripts to join. It’s a bit of a giveaway when there are brand-new accounts joining groups before they’ve even made friends. The legit names have been pixellated; the fakes I’ve left for you to see.
It’s not as bad as, say, giving up on the people who elected you to run the country and letting COVID-19 do whatever it wants, killing citizens in the process. But it comes from the same dark place of putting people second and lining your pockets firstâMark Zuckerberg does it, Robert Mugabe did it, etc. Distract and plunder. In The Guardian:
Boris Johnson will revoke hundreds of Covid regulations and make England the most unrestricted society in Europe from 19 July despite saying new cases could soar to 50,000 a day before masks and social distancing are ditched.
On this, let our own Prof Michael Baker have the last word. Also in The Guardian, which I shared three days ago on Mastodon:
Baker said public health professionals were âdisturbedâ by the UKâs return to allowing Covid to circulate unchecked, and that the phrase âliving with itâ was a âmeaningless sloganâ that failed to communicate the consequences of millions of infections, or the alternative options for managing the virus.
âWe often absorb a lot of our rhetoric from Europe and North America, which have really managed the pandemic very badly,â he said. âI donât think we should necessarily follow or accept Boris Johnson and co saying: âOh, we have to learn to live with virus.â
âWe always have to be a bit sceptical about learning lessons from countries that have failed very badly.â
We really need to be confident of our own position on this. There are too many, especially those propelled by foreign forces with their friends in the foreign-owned media, advocating that we follow other Anglophone countriesâprobably because they lack either intelligence, imagination, pride, or empathy. I’ve spent a good part of my career saying, ‘Why should we follow when we can lead?’
After 13 years, it was time to facelift the Lucire licensing website.
Itâs a very familiar template, similar to what we used for JY&A Consultinga few months back. The home page copy we already had from a flier that we created late last year that Susan Ninan and I worked on; and the âAboutâ pageâs text was mostly carried over (though it still needs 13 years of updates).
I am surprised the old site still netted us enquiries but it was looking extremely dated. The 2008 design was positively archĂŠological in internet terms. However, Iâm not sure if the new one is particularly interesting, because the web design convention is to do something very simple at the moment.
The old one was created with consideration for those who didnât have mouse wheels, whereas these days it seems to be all right, even fashionable, to scroll away.
Hopefully everything is more fit for purpose though, and the links are more useful. Weâve kept the code very light.
And if you do want to license an international fashion magazine with an independent, authentic and engaged firm, you know where to come.
Above: The old and the new Lucire licensing sitesâto my eyes, the old appears more creative, even in 2021.
Promoting DuckDuckGo: ‘Glancing back’ in Lucire KSA, June 2021.
For some time now, in every print issue of Lucire, and Lucire KSA, there is a mention of search engine DuckDuckGo. But I wasnât sure how long we had been doing this, till I checked tonight. We started referencing DuckDuckGo in 2012, on our history page, where we look back at what we wrote 15, 10 and 5 years ago. What we do is feed in the year and Lucire, and let the search engine do the rest. It might not have Googleâs might, but in my book it deserves considerably more loyalty, and all the help we can give.
Above: The latest entry to Autocade at the time of writing: the new Hyundai Tucson (the short-wheelbase one is pictured).
Autocade will cross the 24 million page view mark tomorrow, notching up the latest million views in record time, despite only a tiny increase (14 models, to 4,438) in the database entries. I imagine this is down to a mixture of people finding it useful, and those working from home during lockdowns wanting a break.
You know the drill.
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)
April 2021: 23,000,000 (three months for 23rd million)
June 2021: 24,000,000 (two months for 24th million)
Two months and just over a week, if you want to split hairs. Iâm very pleasantly surprised at the increase, and thank all our readers for visiting and using the site.
I also want to thank Nigel Dunn, Peter Jobes and Keith Adams for their contributions over the years. Now to make sure it stays interesting for me as well as readersâSUVs are just not that fun when they form the majority of new releases!
I havenât been able to find anything on this bug online, but itâs very common.
As far as I can recall, all of our online publications that use Wordpress have themes designed or modified by yours truly. However, Lucire Rouge has a mostly bought-in theme, where my changes have been limited to a couple of CSS rules. The theme developer actually came in and helped us with a few modifications, which shows the extent to which he does follow-up for paying customers.
But there was one thing he was never able to crack, and I donât think itâs his fault, since it happens on a lot of websites, including Medinge Groupâs (also a theme I did not design, though I did earlier ones). On both these sites, there were no bolds and italics. There still arenât on Medingeâs.
There are <strong> and <em> codes in there, but the bolding and obliquing are done by the browser. The font files actually arenât loaded, so what we see are false bolds (the browser attempts to âoverprintâ the roman, duplicating the outline and shifting it marginally to give the illusion of a heavier typeface) and obliques, not italics (itâs the roman file pushed over 15 degrees or so). The former is particularly bad, as the outlines clash, and the result can be hollow glyphs, something that any font developer will know when one outline winds up accidentally on top of another in Fontographer or Fontlab.
These Wordpress themes rely on Google Fonts (another sin, in my opinion) so I donât know if the fault lies with Google or Wordpress, or the developer. If Wordpress does indeed power 70 per cent of websites, then I have to say the bug is awfully common, and I probably do see it on a very high percentage of visited sites.
The themes allow us to select the font family, but the selection only calls a single font file from the family.
Above: A graphic clipping text from Lucire Rouge that I sent to the developer.
The solution, as I discovered after months of toing and froing with Lucire Rougeâs theme dev, was to do your own font-linking rules in the CSS file and upload the fonts themselves to the relevant directory on the server. I must note publicly the âmonthsâ were not his fault, but due to my own delay. I should not expect computer programmers to be typographers, either.
It is something that one needs to watch out for, as the fake bolds and italics are horrible to look at, and must look amateur, even to the non-professional.
Last month, I Tweeted that I would stop replying to advertorial queries sent to us from Gmail, since over 99 per cent of them result in no deal whatsoever. In fact, that 99 is an underestimate.
One of the early (say mid-1990s to the mid-2000s) rules of the ânet was that if you didnât have a custom domain, and were relying on the likes of Hotmail or AOL, then you instantly lacked credibility when approaching another business. But as Gmail became ubiquitous, that rule was no longer that important for us, especially since some of our own team opted to use their Gmails and have their work addresses forward to them. Iâve always been one to go with the flow when it came to my colleagues, so if they were using Gmail more, then who was I to be so negative against others approaching us doing the same?
Except for sanity. Of course Iâll still read emails from Gmail but since I get numerous advertorial enquiries every day, then you have to draw the line somewhere. You might say that Iâve waited too long to do this as the 99 per cent sample was taken over years. But past behaviour does show I tend to stick at something for longer than many people.
Iâm also surprised at how many of these enquirers want us to ignore New Zealand law, and to have advertorials not marked as such. Iâm not in the business of publishing salesâ catalogues, or a salesâ catalogue masquerading as a magazine, so advertorials are marked as promotional material in some way. So even if they get past first base, they usually fall at the second.
Yesterday, I worked remotely, and I donât know what possessed me, but as OneDrive was activated on my laptop, I decided to save a word processing file there, planning to grab it from my desktop machine later in the day.
Normally I would just leave the file where it was and transfer it across the network, which is what I should have stuck with.
Heck, even transferring a file using a USB stick would have been a better idea than OneDrive.
I hadnât signed up to it on my desktop PC. I went through the motions, used the default settings where it said it would back up documents and pictures (while making it clear my files would remain exactly where they were). I grabbed the file I needâthe entire 18 kilobytes of itâand thought nothing more. I deactivated OneDrive as I saw no real use for it any more.
Bad idea, because most of my desktop icons vanished, and my Windows default documentsâ and picturesâ folders were emptied out.
After reactivating OneDrive, I found the lot in the OneDrive folder, and promptly moved them back to their original folders. The desktop filesâthe text files I had on there plus the iconsâI duplicated elsewhere. Ultimately, I made new shortcuts for everythingâthank goodness my laptopâs icon layout is identical to my desktopâsâand restored the three text files from their duplicate directory.
The above took me all of a few minutes to write but in reality I spent an hour fixing thisâsomething that Windows said would not happen.
Chalk it up to experienceâconsider this fair warning to anyone who thinks of using âthe cloudâ.
Also in the âsay one thing, do anotherâ file for yesterday: I attempted to sign in to my Flickr account, which has not been touched since around 2008. I tried a range of addresses I had in 2006, when I originally signed up, and attempted to do password resets. Flickr: âInvalid email or password.â I even tried an address that Yahoo! emailed me at in 2018 concerning Flickr, and which Flickr itself said might be the correct email (use your Yahoo! username and add â@yahoo.comâ to the end of it).
I had no other option but to email their support, and mentioned that I was a paying Smugmug customer, given that the photo site now owns Flickr.
They have responded in a timely fashion, not telling me the email I had used, but said they had sent it a password reset in there.
Surprisingly (or maybe not, considering we are talking about another big US site again), the address was indeed one of the ones I had tried (Iâm glad I kept a record). Except now it worksâwhatâs the bet that post-enquiry, they fixed things up in order to send me that reset email?
I thanked the support person for the reset email, but suggested that they had some bugs, and fixing them would mean less for him to do.
Don Marti linked an interesting article in The Drum in which he was quoted. Duck Duck Go, Firefox and Github have all opposed Googleâs new FLOC tracking method. Meanwhile, Bob Hoffman points out that only four per cent of Apple users have opted in to tracking after the Cupertino companyâs new OS opted you out by default.
Most of the time, people tell me that they find targeted ads âcreepyâ as they appear from site to site, so itâs no wonder that take-up has been so low with Apple users. So if not FLOC, then what?
Well, hereâs a radical idea: show ads on sites that have subject-matter relevant to the advertiser. Itâs what happened before Googleâs monopoly, and there were plenty of smaller ad networks that did a great job of it. The prices were still reasonable, and Google wasnât taking a big cut of the money earned. Of course Big Tech doesnât like it, because they wonât earn as much, and the old system actually required people with brains to figure out how best to target, something creepy tracking has tried to replace.
The old methods, with their personal touch, resulted in some creative advertising workâI remember we had some page takeovers on Lucireâs website where the traditional header was redesigned to show off the R55 Mini, thanks to one of our earlier ad directors, Nikola McCarthy. No tracking involved, but a great brand-builder and a fantastic way for Mini to get a fashion connection. Ads with tracking are so transactional and impersonal: âBuy this,â or, âYouâve searched for this. Buy this.â
I doubt it does the brands much good, and before you say that that doesnât matter, let me also add that it canât do the humans much good, either. The userâs purpose is reduced to clicking through and buying; so much for building a relationship with them and understanding their values. That isnât marketing: itâs straight selling. Which means the marketing departments that put these deals together are doing themselves out of a job. Theyâre also spending money with a monopoly that, as far as I have read, doesnât have independently certified metrics, which 20 years ago would have been a concern with some agencies.
I do like innovations, but every now and then, I feel the newer methods havenât done us much good. Tracking is tracking, no matter what sort of jargon you use to disguise it.
