Where democratizing technology got the better of us

From the start, I’ve been a supporter of the democratization of design. Everyone has the right to access it, because fundamentally good design is something that makes the world a better place. A lot of websites are founded on this, such as Shopify, which has enough flexibility to give most of the stores we visit […]

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For once, the US media were on Facebook’s case (they’ve more cohones than their government)

For once, you didn’t need me to point out the unethical happenings of Facebook, Inc. when the mainstream media actually cared.    First we had the Murdoch Press run ‘The Facebook Files’ in The Wall Street Journal, which I heard about from the incomparable and insightful Bob Hoffman on the 26th ult. The WSJ begins: […]

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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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How about a blog gallery here, if NewTumbl puritanically patrols posts?

In relation to this incident on NewTumbl, one moderator has come forth, writing in the comments to a newer post referring to it: I do a lot of rating on here. Which posts are you referring to? By the way w*nk is M, because we know what wank means. Rating on nT is done by […]

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Mastodon before Twitter: time to change my main social network

With the Twitter advertising preference monster continuing to gather preferences on all of us even after opting out—which basically makes Twitter Facebook—I decided to switch the Mastodon–Twitter Crossposter around.    With Twitter being my main social network, I was quite happy to allow the Crossposter to take my Tweets and turn them into Toots on […]

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The newer the Instagram, the buggier; and why no one should use Google Drive

I’ve discovered that the newer the Instagram, the buggier it is. We’ve already seen that it can’t cope with video if you use Android 7 (a great way to reduce video bandwidth), and, earlier this year, filters do not work.    I downgraded to version 59 till, last week, Instagram began deleting direct messages as […]

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Should I remove Feedburner?

I’m wondering whether it’s worth carrying on with Feedburner. Over the last few years I’ve rid our sites of Facebook gadgets—that means if you “Facebook liked” something here, you’d have to go through the Po.st links above (which I’m hoping are visible on the mobile version), rather than something made by Facebook that could track […]

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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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Check your Google Feedburner feeds: are they serving the correct sites?

A month or so ago, our Feedburner stats for Lucire’s RSS feed delivery tanked. I put it down to the usual “Google being useless”, because we would have expected to see the opposite. The take-up of Feedburner feeds has usually slowly grown since we started this one in 2007, without any promotion on our end. […]

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Google pays out US$17 million over Doubleclick privacy hacking

When surfing, there are precious few people who, like me, de-Googled their lives. There’s the odd blog post here and there, but, overall, those of us who took the plunge are few and far between. It still puzzles me, given the regular privacy problems that I find on Google Dashboard (Google supporters will argue that […]

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