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  • Posts

    • A Horse With No Name
      Can you believe it's been 25 years?

      By A Horse With No Name · Posted

      Sounds good. 
    • A Horse With No Name
      Random Thoughts Thread

      By A Horse With No Name · Posted

    • A Horse With No Name
      Random Thoughts Thread

      By A Horse With No Name · Posted

    • Drew Dowdell
      Random Thoughts Thread

      By Drew Dowdell · Posted

      I know the Site News forum doesn't get a lot of traffic....  
    • Drew Dowdell
      Can you believe it's been 25 years?

      By Drew Dowdell · Posted

      C&G's 25th birthday is coming up in August of this year and I wanted to give you some updates. I haven't been posting as much lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not here.  I am working on a massive overhaul of the site ahead of our 25th birthday. Background:  The Invision Community software we are on is V4. Support for V4 is tapering off rapidly as V5 was released over a year ago.  V5 is a major change to how the software operates and as a result many of the plug-in authors who wrote software that I purchased for us have abandoned their projects. This has put me in the position of holding off on V5 until I can get certain things built or replaced. In the meantime, I'm also making a lot of changes in the background that will translate over to V5 seamlessly. What's done: The Garage has been completely replaced.  The author of the Garage plug-in abandoned it years ago. His site is still active but loaded with spam posts.  I used Claude Code to reverse engineer his plug-in into an IPS.Pages app (the app that runs our Articles system and comes with the main software).  My primary goal here was to get all of your vehicle profiles transferred into the new system and preserved prior to a V5 upgrade. I will make the Garage prettier once we move. Fixed an issue where Google treated the comments forum of an article as duplicate content. This watered down our search results significantly, hindering people from finding the site. It will take Google months to figure all this out and fix it, but it will improve things going foward. Fixed an issue where Google was only able to read 500 of our Albums. What's in progress: Albums are getting massive search engine optimization overhaul. I'm using AI to read every single one of our nearly 2000 albums to properly optimize them for search results.  For albums, the AI downloads the thumbnails, analyzes the pictures, adds meaningful descriptions, and special tags that help the search engines. It then finds the article that album is associated with and creates links to each other. Instead of Image01.jpg the search engine now sees "2027 Nissan Z NISMO front three-quarter view at dusk". This process is very resource intensive and the AI can only do about 50 a day.  Articles are getting optimized as well. We have almost 7,000. You will probably have noticed this in the latest articles from @G. David Felt and myself. When one of us posts, the article is held hidden until I run the optimization process on it. It adds Headings, image tags, and meta tags for the search engines. It will do minor grammar and spelling checks, but the AI has very strict instructions not to change the tone, voice, and feel of the article. What you are reading is by us even if it gets a little punctuation and grammar polish after. In addition to SEO changes, older article sometimes use formatting that no longer works in the current software. There's frequently broken image links, pagination that doesn't work properly, and more.  The AI is fixing it all.  New fields have been added to Articles that you can't see. It allows us authors to classify the article based on news, opinion, new car release, historical, and more. Also make, model, model year, size, class, and others.  What this will allow me to do is build Hub pages.  We will have an EV hub for example. The current Auto Show categories will go away and be replaced with Auto Show Hubs.  Major brands that get a lot of search traffic will get their own hubs, so we'll likely have a GMC hub and Mercedes-Benz hub.  These hubs will consolidate content from Articles, Albums, and Forums into one space.   Want to look at all content for GMC from 2018 - 2020? You'll be able to filter on that.  The AI is also going to back fill this data to all of our old articles. I completed the first test run of 50 articles this morning. Only 6,950 to go!  Our weekly newsletter is about to resume. You can manage your Subscription preferences in your Account Settings.  We have officially opened the doors to welcoming AI Crawlers and instructed them to cite us correctly if they use our information. We now have a published AI Crawling Policy and the background site instructions for the crawlers to follow.  Roadmap - There's a lot to do still before our birthday! V5 Upgrade - I am planning for this to happen in June of this year, possibly earlier if I can get the hubs pages built faster. There will be a significant update to the look and feel of the website when this happens. Our current theme vendor also quit now that V4 is done. Dedicated App - We already have the progressive web app, but for August I am planning on releasing native iOS and Android apps in the app stores. Automatic distribution to Social Media - draw in more traffic to our articles. We will have a slight tweaking of our branding. If you get the site update e-mails, you'll see the beginnings of it already. We'll have some updated graphics for Pride month and for our Birthday coming out mid-summer. What Else? I've been elected to the board of the Washington Auto Press Association (WAPA) for 2026. It will give me better access to content making opportunities. I'm actively developing another app of my own for your homes that you will all be invited to the Beta for. I'll make another post on that later today. Assuming that app takes off, I will be quitting my other consulting gigs that I've been working at full time for over a year with and focus on Cheers & Gears plus my other app called Apartmatic.

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