Google searches aren’t straightforward any more

I haven’t used Google as a default search engine for 15 years, so odds are I haven’t witnessed its enshittification as gradually as most people. To me it is a surprise when I see new bugs and errors.     Have these errors simply increased so imperceptibly over time that people just accept them? This […]

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Autocade at 42 million, kicked off Weibo, and random links

The anorak posts about Autocade milestones now appear on Autocade World, and we hit 42 million page views earlier this week. In other news, a pro-China political post saw my Weibo suspended ‘temporarily’, no sign on when this will be lifted. Hence the Weibo logo disappearing from the footer of this blog. It is a […]

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No matter how bad you had it, someone had it worse

Two things: I did say “AI” programs would ultimately make up false stories about us all. And what happened to me in 2024 was not as bad as what happened to Arve Hjalmar Holmen in Norway. There are still a few disinformation stories left about me—about four more where companies who would normally enforce their […]

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Six refreshed or brand-new company websites since 2021

I am going to give ourselves a pat on the back over the last few years of redesigns and site developments, helped to no small degree by getting all our sites off AWS (Amazon Web Services), which must be the most disempowering, retrograde set-up for hosting I have encountered in 30-plus years of working in […]

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Autocade World: the site of the book of the site

  When The Producers—the film with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane—was released, Mel Brooks said it was the film of the musical of the film. Autocade World is the website of the book of the website. My intro on the site gives the raison d’être, but in a nutshell, the new site initially exists to […]

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Autocade reaches 5,200 models

2024 Luxeed R7 in pink, facing rightward; beach scene behind it.

We’ve arrived at 5,200 models on Autocade, after catching up on some more recent Chinese brands. The 5,200th model is a crossover, but at least it’s rather more stylish: the Luxeed R7. We’ve had the earlier S7 there for a while, and now we’ve completed the Luxeed line-up. In fact, we’ve completed the current line-ups […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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Carry on designing

Journeys through time are fascinating. Earlier this week, I looked at some of the websites we liked from the Jack Yan & Associates links’ section. In many cases, it was a trip down memory lane, as some sites still had their 2000s layouts. Sadly, this could mean that a few of them will disappear in […]

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Jack Yan & Associates gets a new home page

  Not really major news, since it’s virtually the same template as we used for JY&A Media earlier this year: Jack Yan & Associates has a new home page. Gone is the random image that headed the old page in favour of a photo I took in Dubai that I rather liked—one of the earlier […]

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