One award, one interview—positive publicity for May–June 2022

  On to more positive things. Earlier this year, Luxlife got in touch with us, to say Lucire had been shortlisted for their awards. It was later confirmed that we had become their ‘Most Pioneering Online Fashion Magazine 2022’, which I was very happy about—especially as we started 25 years ago. The judges did know […]

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Lucire’s holding page prior to launch

Of course I remember there was a holding page prior to Lucire launching on October 20, 1997 at 7 a.m. EST, or midnight NZDT on October 21, 1997. I just didn’t remember what it exactly looked like, till I discovered it at the Internet Archive:     There was no semicolon in JY&A Media, not […]

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Browser history

In 2011, I was definitely on Firefox.   I believe I started browsing as many did, with Netscape. But not 1.0 (though I had seen copies at university). I was lucky enough to have 1.1 installed first. I stuck with Netscape till 4.7. Its successor, v. 6, was bloated, and never worked well on my […]

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Hopefully this week: farewell, Amazon Web Services

  Wow, we’re nearly there: the long journey to migrate our sites off AWS and on to a new box. We began hosting there in 2012 but the server—which appears to have had a single major update in 2016—was getting very old. In 2018 we began searching for someone who knew about migrations. A second […]

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What’s popular on Autocade

What’s been quite fascinating with having the stats reset on Autocade is getting a fresh perspective on what its most popular pages are. When a website has been going for 14 years, and the stats have never been refreshed, it doesn’t give you the most up-to-date picture. You know historically what was most popular, but […]

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Back, on the new box

There are a few experiments going on here now that this blog is on the new server. Massive thanks to my friend who has been working tirelessly to get us on to the new box and into the 2020s. First, there’s a post counter, though as it’s freshly installed, it doesn’t show a true count. […]

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Most of our top 10 sellers reflect our ignorance

The Suzuki Swift: one of the saving graces on New Zealand’s top 10 list.   At the Opel relaunch briefing yesterday, I was shocked to find that these were New Zealand’s top selling vehicles for 2021. I knew about the first two, but had always assumed a Toyota Corolla would follow, plus some regular cars. […]

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Slightly slower growth at Autocade as it reaches 27,000,000 page views

Autocade did get to 27,000,000 page views some time last week, earning its latest million in two-and-a-half months. It was a slower pace of growth than what I had observed through the latter part of 2021, probably because I hadn’t done too many updates to the site during Q4 (unsurprisingly, having had to deal with […]

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The erosion of standards

For homeowners and buyers, there’s a great guide from Moisture Detection Co. Ltd. called What You Absolutely Must Know About Owning a Plaster-Clad Home, subtitled The Origin of New Zealand’s Leaky Building Crisis and Must-Know Information for Owners to Make Their Homes Weathertight, and Regain Lost Value.    My intent isn’t to repeat someone’s copyrighted […]

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When Here WeGo still sends you to the wrong location six years on

Six years ago, I reported this error in Here Maps (a.k.a. Here WeGo), both via the official channels and to a software engineer I knew working there.    It’s still there. There aren’t two Wharekauhau Country Estates (this is the route between them, to highlight just how wrong it is; the westerly one is correct). […]

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