It is time rewrite to X to optimize Y :)
I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
#32my tiny blogs no one reads have been racking up a huge deno deploy and vercel bills ($40-50/mo each) bc I ran them "naked" without a cache or cloudflare or static builds - it didnt matter bc I got like hundreds of visitors a month. they were just hono or whatever api pulling from my backend which could be notion or airtable - super simple, though kind of slow now I suddenly I have 10k visitors a month hammering my ap…
This is why I don't use those serverless setup.
$4 hetzner vps can serve tons of request if you put cloudflare in front of it
I host my own runners for CI and artifcat building on Hetzner VPS (spun on demand).
People are easily lured by pay as you go plans on serverless and other cheap to get started managed services and end up racking huge bills.
This is same reason I don't use stack driver or cloud monitoring and prefer to use graphana + loki + Prometheus setup
My setup cannot be misconfigured and end up racking huge bills.
Re: I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
#33Personally, 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…
I think in general, "Writing on the Internet with the intent to make money" is effectively dead, or at least soon to be dead. AI+bots mean we now have the "infinite typewriter monkeys" from the thought experiment. With infinite supply, the price goes to zero. We need to stop this treadmill of trying to "build reputation" and stop focusing on "symbolic capital" and "clout" and whatever else bloggers are going after. Y…
I am not trying to make money from writing.
What I need is for my writing to spread enough that I can receive opportunities to have my programming ability evaluated.
The reason I write about programming is that, in the past, some readers found my programming essays interesting, and that led to chances for me to be tested. I had to leave graduate school because of financial problems, and I did not graduate from a prestigious university.
So this is not simply about monetizing writing. It is a struggle to receive opportunities. Those are fundamentally different things.
Some people may be happy writing things that nobody reads. But many people are happier when they can share their writing and let their values collide with those of others.
Re: I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
#34I’m very confused about why you’d have such a complex cache arrangement. Sounds like you’re using Cloudflare and Fastly to do roughly the same thing. That sounds like a recipe for more expense and more problems. For the sort of thing you’re doing, it should be as simple as “throw it behind Cloudflare/Fastly/Bunny/whichever private CDN you like” and that’s it. Also the diagram near the end is pretty much incoherent. G…
I am on a low tier Ghost subscription, I could not rewrite some of the HTML. So I do this with Cloudflare and then cache it again.
Yes, the architecture setup is generated by ChatGPT but in itself it says what it needs.
Re: I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
#35Yesterday I logged into cloudflare and found that Cloudflare had blocked chatgpt and claude from accessing my site. https://macrocodex.app This is bad because there are fitness guides on my domain https://macrocodex.app/guides which newbies often put in chatgpt and asks to simplify. I enabled crawl for LLMs. There is lot of misinformation in fitness field so it's better if LLMs get their content from people who atlea…
It is good to make a proper distinction, in the ChatGPT context, between crawlers and agents. The crawlers go for the content to build a new model, the agents serve content to users. The last one can be very useful.
Re: I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
#36I went through a similar process recently. For a while I saw readership of my site gradually increasing, and eventually it became clear that it wasn't human beings. I also used Claude to help me drill into what's going on. Bizarrely, about 80% of my traffic comes from Singapore, which the author mentioned. I don't know why. A lot of the traffic looks real; it stays for a while, clicks different links in different ord…
Same ratio roughly. 80% Crawlers and agents, 20% human. Loads of the agents actually serve the content to humans, mostly in ChatGPT.
Re: I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
#37I denylisted traffic from Singapore. As far as I could discern it was all Windows 11 machines running Chrome accessing pages sequentially. I’d love to not do that, but trying to sift through that is quite the task.
Re: I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
#38Why would I want bots to read my blog?
Re: I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
#39I’m very confused about why you’d have such a complex cache arrangement. Sounds like you’re using Cloudflare and Fastly to do roughly the same thing. That sounds like a recipe for more expense and more problems. For the sort of thing you’re doing, it should be as simple as “throw it behind Cloudflare/Fastly/Bunny/whichever private CDN you like” and that’s it. Also the diagram near the end is pretty much incoherent. G…
Ghost blogs platform already has a cdn as part of their product so, makes even less sense to me.
Maybe we're being trolled and the op is crowd sourcing solutions by posting something ridiculous and getting us to put solutions up
Re: I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now
#40Why would I want bots to read my blog?
Why would bots and the people operating them care what you want?