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, […]
Read More… from Why should any server resources be given to SEO?
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 […]
Read More… from Autocade’s top 20 leaderboard, three years since the reset
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 […]
Read More… from The frauds of online advertising, and blocking sign-up bots
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 […]
I’m told by Mojeek that this should not happen but it has. In October 2023, it had 3,103 results for a site: search for the original Autocade website, beating Google at 2,910 and Bing at 2,170. Mojeek is meant to build on its index but earlier this year, it dropped into the 700s. Currently site:autocade.net […]
Read More… from Substantial drop in site: results at Mojeek; is Ecosia now Google?
The anorak posts about Autocade milestones now appear on Autocade World, and we hit 42 million page views earlier this week. In other news, a pro-China political post saw my Weibo suspended ‘temporarily’, no sign on when this will be lifted. Hence the Weibo logo disappearing from the footer of this blog. It is a […]
Read More… from Autocade at 42 million, kicked off Weibo, and random links
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 […]
Baidu has been offering “AI” enhancement of its images for a while, and yesterday I bit the bullet, created an account, and trialled it. It was a press image that I had in high-res, but Baidu’s image search, strangely, only had a low-res version of it. Could its “AI” turn it into a high-res image? […]
Read More… from Baidu’s “AI” image enhancement tested: clever, but like a hallucination
There may be a group of people today who are far more tolerant and accepting, their numbers increased by young people who have grown up in a far more connected world, and have been exposed to more creeds and races than their forebears. That’s a good thing. And we should, rightly, be intolerant toward the […]
Two things: I did say “AI” programs would ultimately make up false stories about us all. And what happened to me in 2024 was not as bad as what happened to Arve Hjalmar Holmen in Norway. There are still a few disinformation stories left about me—about four more where companies who would normally enforce their […]
Read More… from No matter how bad you had it, someone had it worse