Heritage

  I’m not sure why the history page about my ancestor, 甄舜河 (Gin Sun Hall), has disappeared from the family association’s page, but for others who are descended from him, here’s his pic from the Internet Archive. He lived in the late 13th century. Also from the Archive was this extract from a 1997 publication […]

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The crunch time media face is nothing new

  Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]

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Who pioneered phone food ordering and delivery?

Not that any search engine will find this, but according to the BBC’s The Secret Genius of Modern Life (episode 2), the inventor of the phone orders for food was the Kin-Chu Café at 137 South Brand Boulevard, Glendale, Calif., in 1922 (another link here). ‘Special Delivery Service 11 A. M. to 1 A. M.—Phone […]

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My real expert opinion on Google, SEO, and the mess that’s to come (not the LLM junk)

Skry being right on the money:     Still those web pages about me being a Google SEO expert or having an algorithm named for me are being indexed and prioritized by Google, all because Semrush hallucinated (or was there a malicious hand in this?), told a bunch of people (in south Asia, predominantly) about […]

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Signing up on Seller Central: another Amazon swindle

I thought I’d look at selling the Autocade Yearbook through Amazon, since people who visit the site are in the mood for shopping. Against all my instincts, I’d bite the bullet and make bloody Jeff even richer. But the whole sign-up process is a swindle. Here’s what I sent to them. Hello there:   I […]

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Is Google hiding content critical of itself—while losing the spam battle?

For a while I enjoyed getting some of the hits from the unwary searching for my name in association with the misinformation that Semrush allegedly generated. After all, it’s my name, and I should enjoy the hits for Google SEO jackyan in order to set the record straight, rather than have the unscrupulous among SEO […]

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Semrush, LLMs (or “AIs”), and Google: a three-headed misinformation hydra?

It turns out that Semrush is likely responsible for the misinformation regarding my name. When Shahid Jafar first encountered the fake topic of a new Google algorithm named for me—and apparently created by me—he mentioned he had seen 8,000 references to it. I couldn’t, but it turns out—thanks to another blog post that has incorporated […]

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Check your security settings when putting a Mediawiki installation behind Cloudflare

Some great advice from Cybarbie on Mastodon about Cloudflare and my putting Autocade behind it:       Sure enough, after following her advice, I saw the numbers improve after a 9,000-page-view day, to two consecutive days of 11,000. Visitor numbers have increased from c. 5,500 to 6,490 in a 24-hour period:     This […]

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It would be nice to get my Amazon Associates money

This has been going on for between 10 and 20 years, and I think closer to the latter. Didn’t know Jeff was this hard up for cash. I didn’t record the dialogue last time, giving them the benefit of the doubt, but since I can’t trust the buggers, I will this time. Fed in to […]

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A full day on Autocade with Cloudflare switched on

  It appears that Cloudflare hasn’t affected Mediawiki’s stats (at least not hugely, from what I can tell). Overnight we had about 19,000 views, according to Mediawiki. Cloudflare, meanwhile, reports 5,420 visitors in that same time—three to four pages per visitor sounds acceptable. I realize Cloudflare might count search engine bots, too. I’ll have things […]

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