11–20 of 64 posts
Personally, I think this is a good idea. But the core problem is this: How is a newcomer supposed to build reputation now? Without exaggerated business promises or capital, basic online reputation usually depends on writing. In fact, my own first step into freelancing came because someone found the articles on my Korean blog interesting. So the question is: if the subscribers are bots, what benefit do they actually g…
Why do I get just an empty page?
> Not because I expect a person in Singapore to shave 200ms off their pageload, but because the next request for that page is more likely to come from a retrieval system than a browser, and the request after that, and the one after that. Why do I care if I shave off 200ms from a crawler's request, instead of a human's?
I simply block all AI crawlers with a user-agent check in nginx.conf.
I simply block all AI crawlers with a user-agent check in nginx.conf.
Ideally I'd make the content available to crawlers for training open models, but that seems to be nearly impossible. It would be possible if other AI companies behaved.
> Not because I expect a person in Singapore to shave 200ms off their pageload, but because the next request for that page is more likely to come from a retrieval system than a browser, and the request after that, and the one after that. Why do I care if I shave off 200ms from a crawler's request, instead of a human's?
> If you care about how your content moves through the world now, including through AI systems, you have to care about caching. Not as a performance optimisation for human browsers, but as infrastructure for machine readership.
I simply block all AI crawlers with a user-agent check in nginx.conf.
> Not because I expect a person in Singapore to shave 200ms off their pageload, but because the next request for that page is more likely to come from a retrieval system than a browser, and the request after that, and the one after that. Why do I care if I shave off 200ms from a crawler's request, instead of a human's?
Based on that I think it's more about requests from bots/scrapers having the greatest chance possible of hitting a cache before hitting the blog's origin/real host. Bots will hit some layer of Cloudflare first then they'll hit Fastly and then if not in Fastly they'll hit the Ghost blog's server.
To me, this makes a lot of sense if it's self-hosted but I also thought it was already the standard to shove your self-hosted blog behind a reverse-proxy and cache as much as possible.
And I'm not a professional web developer but all the extra caching layers for a static personal blog seem a bit overkill.
Aside from the graphic, the article is a lot of words about engaging with an LLM to get a full understanding of how caching works for their blog hosting and how it enabled them to change their setup for the better.
It's kind of hard to understand because there are no words about what they actually did or how what they actually did was better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's worse, is they train on your content, and very often you don't even get an attribution link. So the end user never even knows it was your site that provided the information and you never even get a single clickthrough. It's not like the SERPs where someone would click through, read your site, hopefully find it interesting and useful and come back. It's going to be a serious problem and I've already seen sites…
I pulled all the websites I had - some existed for a decade plus and made me hundreds of thousands of dollars. All that is left is bots that theft the value of my work. Until something changes, goodbye.
I simply block all AI crawlers with a user-agent check in nginx.conf.
I also block all AI crawlers. I am not sure why I should give them my content for them to rip it off and make money from it through training or agents. Sadly, a lot of AI companies are trying to make requests indistinguishable from regular browsers from residential connections, so unfortunately I have to use Cloudflare to block them. Ideally I'd make the content available to crawlers for training open models, but tha…
That can’t block Grok, can it?
(You might have a fake iPhone or something visit your site if you ask Grok to retrieve information from it)