When I posted about Autocade Year of Cars 2025 on Vivaldi Social, a chap in Germany, who clearly disliked cars, had a go at me. I pointed out that there were probably more EVs covered in the book than petrol- and diesel-powered cars, but the cynical chap wasn’t having any of it. There should be […]
Category: publishing
Publishing, sometimes relating to JY&A Media matters.
Switching things around: a post about bots written by a human
Sadly, while these Autocade visitor numbers look rosy, Cloudflare does count bots, even if the bots go no further than notching up a “visit” on the system. No data are transferred to them. Fortunately, we have our page-view counter, and with every known “AI” bot blocked on our end, including a bunch that Cloudflare […]
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What really killed the old, cool web
Richard MacManus’s Cybercultural I’ve mentioned as a must-read if you want to explore the history of the web. And today, Stephen Judd showed a collection of links, among which was this 2017 entry by Amy Hoy, ‘How the blog broke the web’. Hoy traces the origins of the blog back to a web diary (web […]
Why should any server resources be given to SEO?
Vindication of yesterday’s decision to block Alibaba’s bots on Autocade: it’s attempting to access load.php with a huge string, not one that would normally be available to a casual web user As Autocade’s visitor numbers surge to over a million a month today, we are continuing to make sure the bots are blocked (and, […]
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Weekend thoughts: farewell, Ian Crawford; online disinformation; Alibaba and Amazon scrapers
It was sad to read of the passing of Ian Crawford, the former TV producer, whom I got to know through Lucire in his post-Crawfords career. I never pressed Ian about Crawford Productions and preferred to keep things on topic about his Pacific resort. It was out of respect as I had the sense (rightly […]
Autocade’s top 20 leaderboard, three years since the reset
Interesting to see the Autocade leaderboard as it was in 2022, as there are some differences today: The first image in the 2022 post was before the site was shifted to a new server. The second was from a couple of months later. There is some jostling around but at this rate, the […]
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The frauds of online advertising, and blocking sign-up bots
Bob Hoffman has his book, Inside the Black Box, available on his website as a free download. It’s a fascinating read about how online advertising is largely a con, with lots of ad fraud, made-for-advertising sites (MFAs), and opaqueness, he explains. Bob is critical about programmatic advertising (25 per cent of programmatic ad dollars are […]
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Some of the feeds are frozen
It looks like Feed Informer (formerly Feed Digest) is frozen, though this is not a complaint. When someone offers a service for free for years, and hasn’t enshittified, then being down once a year (the last time was January 2024) for a few days is hardly worth getting upset about. Last time it was out […]
When dead trees beat the internet
Ben Daubney has an excellent post titled ‘The web used to be a reliable library. AI has ruined it.’ A real-life Duck Duck Go (Bing) search he ran netted him six “AI slop” entries in the top 10, and I’m betting that Google isn’t any better. If search engines had kept up with the game, […]
License from us, not from US
Anti-American sentiment harming sales of your licensed fashion magazine? We have a solution for that. We still provide US coverage but without being US-owned. But, importantly, we recognize that there are great fashion, beauty, lifestyle and travel stories the world over. I have had to think a lot about whether our country-of-origin effect is […]