darekkay's comments

On: Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data

[darekkay]

ai.robots.txt contains a big list of AI crawlers to block, either through robots.txt or via server rules:

https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.tx

[JimDabell → darekkay]

This actually blocks a lot more than just AI crawlers. You shouldn’t use this without reviewing it in detail so that you understand what you are actually blocking.

For instance, it includes ChatGPT-User. This is not a crawler. This is used when a ChatGPT user pastes a link in and asks ChatGPT about the contents of the page.

One of the entries is facebookexternalhit. When you share a link on Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, etc., this is the user-agent Meta uses to fetch the OpenGraph metadata to display things like the title and thumbnail.

Skimming through the list, I see a bunch of things like this. Not every non-browser fetch is an AI crawler!

[Bender → darekkay]

Your link is missing the t at the end of .txt. You should be able to edit it though.

On: Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

[darekkay]

There are web APIs for both.

[JimDabell → darekkay]

“Web Bluetooth” is a Blink-only API that both Mozilla and Apple rejected on security grounds.

[mdhb → JimDabell]

What a weird thing to put in scare quotes.

[echoangle → darekkay]

Not on iOS. There’s no Bluetooth support in safari.

On: Page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website

[darekkay]

Check out the following:

- https://indieblog.page/

- https://blogdb.org/

- https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs

On: Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time

[darekkay]

> the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content;

It rather depends on the amount of content the RSS _author_ includes in the RSS feed. There's nothing in the RSS/Atom protocol that prevents you from reading the entire article, but some website creators decide to truncate the feed content.

My RSS reader of choice, InoReader, has the option to download the original website which solves the problem. However, I have over 200 feeds and it's rare to find one without the entire content being included.

On: Uchū – Color palette for internet lovers

[darekkay]

I've analyzed the palette with my own tool, a11y-contrast[1], and indeed the luminance is not uniform. I wrote [2] about why this might be a desired property of a color palette.

[1] https://github.com/darekkay/a11y-contrast

[2] https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-color-palette/

On: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

[darekkay]

> 1000s of requests a day

Some RSS readers are quite aggressive with their polling time. At the same time, a single request may serve thousands of users. However, you can check your logs and get the actual number of subscribers, at least for popular RSS readers: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

On: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

[darekkay]

I've once blogged about this technique, in case someone wants to learn more about it: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-styling/

[pl4nty → darekkay]

thanks, really appreciate that your post was concise and included examples/followups. only needed 10 minutes to style my own rss feed

On: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

[darekkay]

I've been using XYplorer for 10 years now and it's fantastic. There are just so many features and quality of life improvements over the Windows explorer.

It's written by a single person, and they're very responsive. I've recently reported a bug with the search (the first that I've noticed in all those years), and it's been fixed within a day. I'm only worried about the bus factor a little.

I have a GitHub repo with some of my settings/scripts/notes for XYplorer if someone's interested: https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplore...

On: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

[darekkay]

Not the OP, but I've been using XYplorer for 10 years now. I have a sidebar with a few scripts. Here are the ones I use the most:

- Extract selected archives

- Flatten current folder

- Convert selected file(s) to various formats (e.g. JPG to WebP or vice versa)

- Optimize selected image file(s) (smaller file size)

- Prepare image file(s) for publishing on my photography blog: strip irrelevant EXIF, create two variants (thumbnail and a bigger picture); see my post: https://darekkay.com/blog/photography-website/#pipeline

- Prepare image file(s) for sharing - similar as above, but more for sharing vacation photos with my family on WhatsApp)

- Rename files to a certain format (e.g. images to "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss")

- Check selected file with Virus Total

- Start a weekly backup to my external drive

- Backup my server files to my local drive

- Create a rectangle "album art" file, see my post: https://darekkay.com/blog/resize-album-art-images/

Many of those are just shell scripts and apps that I run right from XYplorer, but it's way faster than through CLI.

I've documented some of the XYplorer stuff here (see also the "scripts" folder): https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplore...

On: Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you

[darekkay]

Kagi Small Web (the index is open source) comes to my mind, even though it doesn't specifically focus on UI annoyances.

https://blog.kagi.com/small-web