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 […]

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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 […]

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Going to HTTPS need not be this hard

Autocade finally got a secure certificate. The reason it took so long: people who make these things write convoluted instructions to lock out laypeople, or they are simply wrong. The Autocade one is through Let’s Encrypt, which has a confusing website. It linked to instructions for our web host, Hetzner, which were plain wrong. The […]

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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) […]

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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 […]

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BMW iX takes Autocade to 4,700 models

We’ve hit 4,700 models on Autocade, and unfortunately the model that sees in the milestone is, to my eyes, visually challenging. Still, there’s a part of me that’s quite curious about the interior and how it drives. Goes to show that there’s no planning in making the BMW iX our 4,700th. I also want to […]

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Autocade reaches 31 million page views

  It took four months but Autocade’s finally at 31 million page views, having made it to 3,352,136 this morning (April 2). That smaller number is the page views since the program was reinstalled last year. Add that to the last recorded total before the reinstallation of 27,647,011, and you have 30,999,147. At c. 10,000 […]

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How Google fares in a site: search if your site is all PHP—Wordpress users beware

After the last post, you may be thinking: surely if my site was entirely PHP, Google wouldn’t have a problem identifying which were the most important articles? They are the biggest search engine in the world and all that data would ensure that they knew how to rank the dynamic pages properly. They would have […]

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The golden age of Pontiac illustrations

The gargantuan full-size 1971–6 Pontiacs (Laurentian, Catalina, Parisienne, Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari) went up on Autocade last week, and they reminded me of the golden era of Pontiac illustrations. That era didn’t stretch into the 1970s that much: you saw them for the 1967s through to the 1971s, before photography took over. I […]

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Autocade is about to turn 15

Above: The 1966 Alfa Romeo Giulia, the most recent entry to Autocade.   Next week, Autocade will turn 15. I don’t expect big editorials extolling its history, mainly because the site has not changed much in principle or appearance since it was first conceived in 2008. We did a single video under the Autocade name, […]

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