How to Disallow GPTBot Crawling in robots.txt

To tell OpenAI’s web crawler to skip your site, add these lines to your robots.txt (see docs): (via Hidde de Vries) The outlook is bleak: There’s no way to win this if you don’t want to be scraped at all, ever, except by not putting things online. If they don’t scrape your content, they scrape the copycat sites as Rik Schennink pointed out. Or ignore the robots.txt rule. (How could you tell, anyway?)

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32-Bit Cafe: Personal Website Ideas

Here’s a truly inspirational list of things to do from the 32-Bit Cafe, “a community of like-minded website hobbyists and professionals helping to make the personal web fruitful and bountiful again”. It covers these topics:

  • Page Ideas
  • Potential Website Topics
  • CSS & Page Design
  • Art & Graphic Design
  • Technical Tasks
  • Accessibility
  • Interactivity
  • Social

It’s a refreshing read (and brings up a lot of nostalgia)!

via Jack Baty

How to Abort a Chain of Rake Tasks on Error

I use nanoc as my static site creator for this blog. It’s written in Ruby, my favorite scripting language. And so I use a Rakefile to automate most things, like generating a fresh copy of the site and deploying it to my server. Only last week did I find out how to make Rake not continue when a part of its tasks failed. Most of the stuff I use is wrappers around shell commands with a few system notifications sprinkled in. $? does capture the latest shell call’s return value (kudos dnsimple.com):

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Feed for All Zettelkasten Posts

You can now subscribe to the posts tagged with “Zettelkasten only. I created a new feed which you can find here. With this feed, you get the Zettelkasten stuff without all the other news. The thing is that you’ll miss all the productivity tips which have nothing to do with the Zettelkasten method.

Don’t know what a feed is and wonder what your browser displays when you click on the link? The US Government website got you covered:

It’s an easy way for you to keep up with news and information that’s important to you, and helps you avoid the conventional methods of browsing or searching for information on websites.

Feeds are means to subscribe to website updates. The updates get pushed into your feed reader inbox, just like e-mail. This is far better than checking pages you like manually all the time. In Firefox, for example, you can bookmark website feeds and get an auto-updating list of new articles in your bookmarks bar. Most modern browsers got plug-ins to subscribe to feeds. Also, see a list of feed readers on Wikipedia for inspiration.

I use Fever to subscribe to other websites’ feeds.

If you didn’t know, the feed for all kinds of posts on this website is here. Subscribe to this one to receive notifications for all posts to this here “Worklog” of mine.

New Article Overview

I just added a manual, curated overview of articles on this website. There, I have collected (mostly) Zettelkasten-related posts and grouped them under headings which, at this time, make sense to me. This is subject to changes when the archive grows, of course.

At the moment, the big categories are these:

  • Knowledge Management: general information about what it means to work and learn efficiently.
  • Writing: posts on the production of lasting knowledge, and about sharing it with others through your own texts.
  • Reading: posts about the process of acquisition of new things and the organization of sources.

I will add longer pieces to the list. Most items here aren’t blog posts but articles sporting 2000 words or more. I will leave out smaller posts like this one and the occasional software announcement. Only the ‘featured’ posts will be added to the list, you could say.

With this change in place, I feel free to blog more often. I didn’t want to water down the timeline of higher quality content with short posts. The curated overview will help you find the gems on this site, and it helps me preserve them. I hope you like it.