Worse reality shows

2Tapu on Twitter hashtagged #worserealityshows tonight, with Who Wants to Marry a Mutineer? as her suggestion. The hashtag, which went viral tonight, inspired everything from The XXX Factor and America’s Next Top Bottom to The Amazing Racist to the very disturbing Are You Sexier than a Fifth Grader?.    2Tapu contributed So You Think You […]

Read More… from Worse reality shows



Four million page views on Autocade

I came across an old blog post that showed that Autocade took four years to get 2,000,000 page views: not bad for an encyclopædia that receives very little promotion. That was in March 2012. It has since crossed 4,000,000, which meant the second 2,000,000 took 21 months to achieve (in December 2013). If the growth […]

Read More… from Four million page views on Autocade



Open the shop and strip away the jargon

I’ve been reading this Grauniad interview with Rory Stewart, MP, referred by Jordan McCluskey. I’m told that Stewart, and Labour’s Frank Field are the two worth listening to these days in British politics. On Stewart, someone who can speak with a Scots accent and has lived in Hong Kong must be a good bloke.   […]

Read More… from Open the shop and strip away the jargon



Sounds familiar? Works on all browsers, except for IE8

I’m sure this is familiar to anyone who has done web development. Lucire has a new home page and the tests show: Firefox on Mac, Windows, Ubuntu: OK Chromium on Windows: OK IE9 and IE10: OK Safari on Mac OS X, Iphone and Ipad: OK Dolphin on Android: OK A really old version of Seamonkey […]

Read More… from Sounds familiar? Works on all browsers, except for IE8



Steve Guttenberg shows us how a Kiwi accent is done

Back in September, The Dominion Post claimed on its front page that I have an ‘accent’ that is holding me back. It was a statement which the editor-in-chief subsequently apologized for, and which she had removed from the online edition—you can judge for yourself here if the claim was a falsehood. Still, despite having lived […]

Read More… from Steve Guttenberg shows us how a Kiwi accent is done



Facebook pages are broken

While my personal Facebook page and profile continue to have good reach and engagement, the Lucire Facebook is down, especially compared with this time last year.    We’ve increased fans and, on our site, readership, but it’s becoming more and more evident that traffic isn’t coming via the Facebook fan page.    It makes you […]

Read More… from Facebook pages are broken



Business etiquette 101: don’t threaten lawsuits against a customer proposing an idea which you later adopt

Interesting to spot this link. When I started Autocade in 2008, I approached Haymarket, letting them know I was a Classic and Sportscar reader since it began in the 1980s, and I was inspired by the Sedgwick guides that it ran then. Autocade was to be an online cyclopædia that would use a brief format, […]

Read More… from Business etiquette 101: don’t threaten lawsuits against a customer proposing an idea which you later adopt



Let’s improve on the Wellington logo

The city’s new logo—it is not a rebrand if the underlying tenets are the same—has not met with much support.    The next question must be: all right, if we’re all so smart, can we do better?    Ian Apperley and I think we can. Ian approached me yesterday morning to ask whether we should […]

Read More… from Let’s improve on the Wellington logo





Responding to blog comments—and where to from here?

Wordpress, with its automatic deactivation of Jetpack after each update, messed up, so I have no metrics for the last two months of this blog. Nor did it send me emails notifying me of your comments. It would have been useful to know how the last couple of posts went, to gauge your reaction to […]

Read More… from Responding to blog comments—and where to from here?