A montage of 20 years of Lucire print covers.

Lucire turns 27, while Autocade’s origins are even older

A montage of 20 years of Lucire print covers.

Lucire turns 27 tomorrow (at the stroke of midnight NZDT as the day ticks over to Monday). After prompting by my friend Richard MacManus, I wrote a piece to mark the anniversary. Though after the song and dance of our 25th anniversary two years ago, I’ve kept it low-key.   Meanwhile, I’ve thinned out some […]

Read More… from Lucire turns 27, while Autocade’s origins are even older



Google results are old

That Google seems to get older and older. Here are the top 10 for site:lucire.com as of October 10, 2024.     The home page isn’t there, and maybe that’s OK. But what is there is the index.html file to the 2000 folder, which was put there to catch any programming errors (e.g. forgetting to […]

Read More… from Google results are old



Continuing the disinformation removal and bot blocks

Call me an idealist, but I think people should stop using those search engine copy massaging programs, write like real humans, and expect the technology to bend to us, rather than the other way round. That’s how we still conduct business. There are still disinformation pages about me out there, but no new ones since […]

Read More… from Continuing the disinformation removal and bot blocks



Blocking the Semrush bots

It’s not enough to block just Semrush’s bot, SemrushBot, in one’s robots.txt, since they have a whole bunch of them. We’ve usually allowed all bots but with “AI” and Semrush’s terrible programming that wasted hours of my time every day for nine months, there are certain parties no longer welcome to crawl. To block Semrush […]

Read More… from Blocking the Semrush bots



Autocade reaches 39 million page views

Here we are, 39 million page views on Autocade, as the stats’ counter ticked over to 11,361,125 earlier today (which we add to the previous installation’s 27,647,011). It’s two months, 16 days since we were at 38 million, and as July and August were leap months, that’s 78 days. Last time it was 50 days. […]

Read More… from Autocade reaches 39 million page views



Online history lesson

  It took a couple of days’ tweaking, but the Wordpress part of Jack Yan & Associates’ website now (nearly) matches the new template on the home page, T&Cs and contact page. This was a tricky one due to the conflicts between the BootstrapMade template and the standard Understrap one for Wordpress. Also debatable is […]

Read More… from Online history lesson



Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?

Above: In 1995, the Mercury website was quite flash, and I recall seeing the 1996 Sable on there, as a transparent GIF, and being impressed. Unfortunately, that predates the Internet Archive, so there’s no record of that incarnation of the site. This press photo will have to do to remind me of that moment almost […]

Read More… from Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?



A positive report from one blind reader

Feeling positive about this feedback from a blind Mastodon user, Robert Kingett, when he checked out Lucire and Autocade online. I know lots of internal pages need proper alt text, but his cursory report is very good, and encourages us to do better.     I generally hear positive things about the use of alt […]

Read More… from A positive report from one blind reader



Recycle time

Thirty-plus years of my files are being recycled. Only a last few years are left to go. I kept them, thinking they might be of some historical use—maybe future entrepreneurs might want to see the efforts I put in to get the country’s first digital font range known, or building up Lucire from nothing. As […]

Read More… from Recycle time



Autocade reaches 38 million page views

Autocade made it comfortably to 38 million page views today, the counter showing 10,362,605. Add the 27,647,011 on the old server, that’s 38,009,616 (as expected yesterday when it was sitting just shy of the 38 million mark). Currently there are 5,059 entries on the site, and we got to the latest million in just under […]

Read More… from Autocade reaches 38 million page views