Autocade’s MediaWiki software gets locked down

Autocade’s third birthday is on Tuesday, though today I had to introduce something that goes against the principles of MediaWiki: the prevention of public user registrations.    Despite adding an Akismet anti-spam extension last week, spammers, evidently using non-blacklisted IPs, continued to add false content with their links on to the site today.    I […]

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Google’s new algorithm will likely weed out content mills

I’m not enough of a bastard to only dis Google, because they have made a pretty good move today.    Google’s new algorithm, it is claimed, will weed out content farms, one type of site that has annoyed us here regularly.    These are sites that just pinch others’ content automatically. Because search engines pick […]

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My holiday as a car anorak

Since New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are about the only two days I actually take off, I spent some time adding entries on Autocade, a site that doesn’t seem like “work” to me. It’s my hobby.    The randomizer, which my friend Peter Jobes installed for me on the site’s home page, came […]

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Bingo! Merry Christmas!

Here’s a Christmas treat, an hour in to Christmas Day in New Zealand. Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas, filmed in 1977 33 days before the crooner’s passing, featured a duet between Bingo and David Bowie.    Taped on September 11, 1977, the special aired after Crosby’s death, on November 30. The set is supposedly the […]

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What others write about their Firefox crashes; Chrome is the oddity with font-face

  It has been interesting reading the comments from other disgruntled Firefox users over the ‘unmark purple’ error (nsXULControllers::cycleCollection::UnmarkPurple(nsISupports*))—now that I can trace the majority of my crashes to this.    Yesterday, Mozilla’s Crash Reports’ site crashed (rather fitting), and today, the CSS wouldn’t load, which allowed me to read what others wrote on the […]

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Roy Axe gives a sincere look at his career

Keith Adams is well known to many motorheads out there. We probably encountered him initially at his excellent AROnline, formerly The Unofficial Austin–Rover Resource. More recently, some of us have got to know Keith as a writer for Octane, where his well researched articles remind me of some of the best motoring journalists’ work. They […]

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The Julian Assange affair looks like a Smith and Jones gag

In the news: Julian Assange.    While the prosecutor in Sweden is denying it, the lesson here seems to be: publish a Wikileak naming anti-Taliban Afghan sources and risk getting them killed, and nothing happens to you. Publish a Wikileak embarrassing the United States, and get the whole media talking, while you’re charged with rape. […]

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Duck Duck Go adds a Lucire bang

Aside from writing a branding report today (which I will share with you once all contributors have OKed it), I received some wonderful news from Gabriel Weinberg of Duck Duck Go.    Those who are used to the Duck will know that you can search using what he calls bangs—the exclamation mark. On Chrome, which […]

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TPPA could turn the clock back

During the campaign trail, people tended to ask me if I was left or right. While I cheekily said, ‘Forward,’ many a time (and had at least one imitator), there’s something to be said for abandoning what are, effectively, nineteenth-century constructs.    And unless you are DI Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes, you need […]

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Putting a full site feed on a Facebook fan page is not a good idea

Even though more young women are spending time on Facebook at the exclusion of other sites, last night I decided to stop connecting the Lucire RSS feed in to its Facebook fan page.    We began the fan page very late, having relied on using a Facebook group. And even then, these were promoted half-heartedly. […]

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