Forget the “shoulds”

My Lucire interview with Bay Area designer Devan Gregori has gone online—it’ll likely appear in print afterwards with different visuals. Devan has a wonderful story about how she came to be a fashion designer, and it’s very different to those who fell into the trade through a childhood interest or watching their grandmother sew. I […]

Read More… from Forget the “shoulds”



Lucire unplugs from OnlyKlans, and we find more Wikiality

  I guess whomever wrote this in Wikipedia is being helpful, but the second pronunciation shown is not how you pronounce Lucire. It may be how you pronounce lucire, the quaint Romanian word, in Romanian, but it’s not the pronunciation of the magazine’s name. Maybe the Lucire Romania crew adopted this pronunciation when dealing with […]

Read More… from Lucire unplugs from OnlyKlans, and we find more Wikiality



Meta is grabbing your content for its ‘generative AI’—hopefully this opt-out form works

Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and presumably Whatsapp) is taking user content for its ‘generative AI’. I don’t remember signing up for this, but then I stopped using these sites regularly. Allegedly you can opt out of this. I opted out of ad preference collection there and it made no difference, but in case it […]

Read More… from Meta is grabbing your content for its ‘generative AI’—hopefully this opt-out form works



A keyword might help in a Bing site: search

After I suggested that Mike Masnick of Techdirt try out Mojeek for his site:techdirt.com search, since Bing was coming up blank, he decided he would try the search with Techdirt as his keyword (which is what Mojeek requires by design: it doesn’t site searches without search terms; here he would have had to do site:techdirt.com […]

Read More… from A keyword might help in a Bing site: search



‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine

Some say, ‘Fake it till you make it,’ as a positive thing. In fact, a very dear friend used to say it, and it did him a lot of good. But then, he’s an honest sort of chap and he never promised something he couldn’t deliver. His take on faking it was to present a […]

Read More… from ‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine



Hiding a Mediawiki category; Techdirt on its absence from Bing (‘Welcome to the party, pal’)

Since Autocade was reinstalled last year, an errant line appeared on the home page: ‘Category: Pages using DynamicPageList3 parser tag’. The sole page that was listed under this Mediawiki category: the home page. It was very useless information, especially for site visitors. I finally discovered how to hide this, and I’m recording it as the […]

Read More… from Hiding a Mediawiki category; Techdirt on its absence from Bing (‘Welcome to the party, pal’)



Autocade reaches 32 million page views

It’s been a slow haul to get to 32 million page views on Autocade, but we are there, in four months rather than the dire five I predicted earlier. The last installation reached 27,647,011 the day before it was unplugged, and the new one has reached 4,362,443, which totals 32,009,454. I don’t think we can […]

Read More… from Autocade reaches 32 million page views



Mojeek continues to refine its search results; Bing collapses again

Props to Mojeek again. I gave them feedback about how lucir was coming up for a search about Lucire. There is a search engine convention that identifies root words and delivers variants, but I argued that as I was querying a capitalized word, maybe Lucire should appear further up top. To their credit, this now […]

Read More… from Mojeek continues to refine its search results; Bing collapses again



Autocade’s top 10, August 2023

  Although Autocade’s viewership has gone down, it’s still fascinating (maybe only to me) to see what the top 10 look like since the site was reinstalled last year.   Toyota Corolla (E210) (7,307 views) Ford Taunus 80 (5,830 views) Daewoo Winstorm (4,943 views) Opel Astra J (4,688 views) Ford Fiesta Mk VII (4,683 views) […]

Read More… from Autocade’s top 10, August 2023



How not to buy a website

  Not long ago, someone tried to buy Autocade. In the interests of transparency, I showed them a couple of forward plans we had, and we never heard from them again. I had done a bit of research on the potential buyer and it seems their MO is to buy sites on the cheap, and […]

Read More… from How not to buy a website