I don’t know how much more abundantly clear we can make things on our sites when we say, for instance, at Lucire: ‘We receive multiple enquiries from SEO or “outreach” companies about paid or guest posts each day, and if you fall into this category, please do not contact us: it’s going to be no.’ […]
Tag: Medinge Group
Luxury Facts on the Jaguar rebrand (featuring Cristián Saracco and me)
A nice way to conclude 2024: my name in a real article by a real journalist with quotations attributed to me that are actually by me. I’m so grateful to Tejashee Kashyap and Luxury Facts for interviewing me and my friend Dr Cristián Saracco, and to our friend Philippe Mihailovich for connecting Tejashee and me […]
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Twenty years of blogging
First up, as I’ve publicly posted this and have helped out myself, my friend and colleague Hasan Abu Afash is in Palestine, and I don’t need to tell you what he and his people are facing. If you can help out, here’s a link to his Paypal. Apparently, August 11, 2023 marked my 20 […]
Personal thoughts about my friend, Merrill J. Fernando
Above: Amanda and me with Merrill in 2016. I was saddened to learn of the passing of my friend Merrill J. Fernando, founder of Dilmah Tea and the MJF Foundation. I’ve written an obit over at Lucire, since he was very much a friend of the magazine, too, and his values of social responsibility […]
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Did Google use your website to train its language-learning model?
It’s going to be very interesting to see the legalities of Google using the contents of 15·1 million websites for its C4 dataset, used to train large language models. Ton Zijlstra put me on to a Washington Post article that revealed which sites were used. He had discovered that his own website (zylstra.org) had provided […]
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Farewell, Sergei Mitrofanov
Farewell, my dear friend Sergei. Taken far too soon. Sergei trying to corral us for a photograph in London in 2015. I’m pretty upset by this so rather than write a fresh tribute (which I will have to do in time in an official capacity), I’m going to quote from what I wrote […]
Hopefully this week: farewell, Amazon Web Services
Wow, we’re nearly there: the long journey to migrate our sites off AWS and on to a new box. We began hosting there in 2012 but the server—which appears to have had a single major update in 2016—was getting very old. In 2018 we began searching for someone who knew about migrations. A second […]
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My first tech post in a while: how I use my social-computing time
Refreshingly, I’ve noticed that my more recent blog posts haven’t been about Big Tech as often. I haven’t changed my views: the ones I’ve stated earlier still stand, and Google and Facebook in particular continue to be a blight on democracy and even individual mental health. A lot of the posts were inspired by […]
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Fixing Wordpress’s problem of fake bolds and italics
I haven’t been able to find anything on this bug online, but it’s very common. As far as I can recall, all of our online publications that use Wordpress have themes designed or modified by yours truly. However, Lucire Rouge has a mostly bought-in theme, where my changes have been limited to a couple […]
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Branding ourselves in the 2020s: a revamp for JY&A Consulting’s website, jya.co
Last night, I uploaded a revised website for JY&A Consulting (jya.co), which I wrote and coded. Amanda came up with a lot of the good ideas for it—it was important to get her feedback precisely because she isn’t in the industry, and I could then include people who might be looking to start a new […]
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