Building a car anorak’s encyclopædia

Above: The first-generation Mitsubishi Minica, though this isn’t the 1962 model. Now on Autocade—though hardly an iconic model. It’s the end of the Gregorian year, which means I get a bit of time to update Autocade. Since 2008, it’s mostly been a labour of love, and typically, the period after Christmas is when I get […]

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Autocade reaches 8,000,000 page views; viewing rate up slightly since last million

I had expected our car encyclopædia Autocade would reach 8,000,000 page views this month, just before its eighth anniversary. The difference was that this time, I was there last Monday GMT (the small hours of Tuesday in New Zealand) to witness the numbers tick over—almost.    Usually, I find out about the milestones ex post […]

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Autocade reaches 7,000,000 page views, growing at its quickest rate

I was surprised to see that Autocade managed its 7,000,000th viewer some time this month, five months after the 6,000,000th. Considering it took three years to get to the first million, this means people are willing to use Autocade more regularly as a resource on the web. As something that started on the side, this […]

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Autocade hits 6,000,000 page views: a few quick figures

The Dongfeng Fengshen AX7, or a Renault with a Peugeot engine (and I don’t mean the PRV V6 or the old Douvrin), entered into Autocade this week. With Autocade hitting 6,000,000 page views earlier this week, here’s a quick anorak’s run-down on the rate of growth. In short: it’s about the same in terms of […]

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Musings on making friends with mobiles

I see Google has messaged me in Webmaster Tools about some sites of ours that aren’t mobile-friendly.    No surprises there, since some of our sites were hard-coded in HTML a long time ago, before people thought about using cellphones for internet access.    The theory is that those that don’t comply will be downgraded […]

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Je suis Charlie

I was watching France 24 about half an hour after the Charlie Hebdo attack and made the above graphic a few hours later, in support of press freedoms and the victims’ families, and showing solidarity with other members of the media. One friend has made it his Facebook profile photo and I followed suit about […]

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A year of random thoughts: 2014 in review

For the last few years, I’ve looked back at the events of the year in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. (In fact, in 2009, I looked back at the decade.) Tumblr’s the place I look at these days for these summaries, since it tends to have my random thoughts, ones complemented by very little critical thinking. They […]

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Quick Autocade stats

I was curious tonight to see the rate of growth of entries on Autocade. It hasn’t changed greatly. The initial 500 didn’t take long, but, since then, every 500 entries have taken 18 months to be added. However, the traffic has grown at a much faster rate. March 2008: launch July 2008: 500 (four months […]

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All the Geelys on Autocade

The Geely King Kong Hatchback, one of the new entries on the Autocade website. Not that I blogged it at the time, but Geely’s multi-brand strategy in 2009 felt doomed. Earlier this year, the company retreated, and brought everything from Englon, Gleagle and Emgrand back under its parent brand again.    It wasn’t unlike Mazda’s […]

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Autocade hits 5,000,000 views: what are its most read and least searched?

With Autocade exceeding the 5,000,000 page view milestone (it’s on 5·12 million), I thought it might be fun to look at a few of the models on the site: the most popular, the least loved, and the first on the site.    Looking at the stats, here are the most popular models. These shouldn’t be […]

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