Google can’t deal with YouTube code; and a farewell to Smugmug after 13 years

Once again, Google is full of bollocks. Its latest email to me says there’s a video on the Lucire website that’s ‘too tall’.     Here’s a screenshot of the offending video on the page it identified.     I checked the embed code, and the width is set to 300, the height to 169. […]

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Google News continues bias against independent media

This is by no means a new complaint, but if you want to give a non-sinister explanation, then the idea that Google is too poor to build its search capability has to be one of them. And that it’s been poor for the good part of a decade. More sinister is the idea that all […]

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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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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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Techdirt’s down to zero results on Bing; meanwhile, Bing shows 1,760 for Lucire

Hat tip to Leighelse on this one, when she alerted me on Mastodon. @DuckDuckGo @yegg Would either of you know, please, and is DDG in a position to help? Our search box is a DDG one (and has been for a long time) and seeing it come up empty constantly since March is disheartening. https://t.co/Wg8CoTq8cg […]

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Sharper headlines for Lucire

  We’ve made a tiny change to the look of the Lucire website, replacing Aileron Ultra Light in the headlines with Newsreader Display Light, namely the 72 pt cut. It always bothered me that Aileron didn’t have proper italics, only obliques. We could have licensed Freight Big Pro Light to match the print magazines, but […]

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Company founders, talk about your businesses and the great work they do

When I launched Lucire into print in 2004, it brought with it some unwelcome elements. On the plus side, it raised the company’s profile and no doubt that helped sales. No one had ever taken a website into print before, with the exception of Yahoo Internet Life, as far as I know. Certainly no one […]

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The state of play of the internet

From Zero Janitor on Tumblr (and found as an image on Mastodon):     Sums up the state of play on the internet nicely. I can’t believe how badly the Reddit situation has been handled, but will leave that to others. A lot has already been written about it, and here’s a good piece in […]

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