Monthly Recap: June 2024

Posted • in life

Tagged: personal now site updates

What’s going on Internet? Can you believe it’s July already? It won’t be long until you see Christmas decorations going up in the shops windows.

After last month’s WeblogPoMo posting marathon I took a big step back from posting and focused on behind the scenes work on the website as well as other activities outside of the website.

I managed to participate in the 32-Bit Cafe’s Code Jam #4: Destination Vacation and get my submission “The Nookie” a Limp Bizkit fansite stuck in the year 2001 submitted. The site isn’t completed and I’m looking forward to plugging away at it over the next few months. We had twelve submissions overall (including my own) which was a fantastic turn out. You can check out the other entries on the destination map that community member ribose put together.

If you want to participate in the future, come and join the 32-Bit Cafe over on our forums and watch out for our next community event.

Blogging

Didn’t have the energy to write about much this month, maybe July will be more inspiring.

Reading

Listened to four books this month alongisde my weekly, fortnightly and monthly podcasts.

  • The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: I saw this as a staff pick at my local bookstore while browsing one afternoon. I picked up the audio book through Libro.fm and gave it a listen. I enjoyed reading it. A time travelling scienfiction romantic spy novel? Interesting story.
  • Shadow Captain by Alistair Reynolds: I read Revenger when it was released and hadn’t thought about it since. I picked this one up and it took me a while to get into it. I guess that was based on the time between reading this and Revenger. I didn’t particularlly like the narrator and could have done without the character voices, I found them distracting.
  • Come As You Are by Michael Azerrad: This book was amazing. Published in 1993, the audio book had an extra chapter added post Kurt’s death in 1994. Michael Azerrad spent a lot of time talking with Kurt, the band and others associated with Kurt and Nirvana. I really like how fresh the stories were rather than if this was written thirty years later.
  • The Storyteller by Dave Grohl: Another fantistic listen, read by Dave Grohl himself. This was a book of stories from different times in Dave’s life. Not in any particular order, often jumping around from year to year. I enjoyed that his retelling of the stories from the Come As You Are book were pretty much the same recounts. Dave Grohl has definitely lived an interesting life.

Music

In my slow endevour to fill out the gaps in my Eminem collection, I managed to pick up a repressing on 2009’s Relapse.

Bookmarks

I managed to bookmark and share all of these. I’ve still got 40 open tabs to get through from this month. Look out for them in July I guess.

Website

As I wasn’t blogging much during June, I took advantage of the downtime to work on the website itself.

I had a go at upgrading to Eleventy 3.0.0 as part of the Eleventy Excellent 3.0 but ended up reverting as parts of the site broke as I had diverged from the original scope of Eleventy Excellent. I plan to have another go at the 3.0.0 upgrade this month.

Started blocking bots with robots.txt and .htaccess and automated site redirects, check the blog posts above for more details.

Check out the Changelog for the complete list of changes.

Around the web

June around my corner of the web was all about fighting AI scraping bots and their complete disregard for anything.

Cory has been maintaining an open source list of known hostile robots for ages now but this whole thing really kicked off this month as these companies building and operating these scrappers started getting super agressive. See Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent, Perplexity AI, Robots.txt, and Other Questions, Perplexity.AI Is Susceptible to Prompt Injection From Arbitrary Pages (and some other issues), and As If Perplexity Didn’t Suck Enough They’re Also Hotlinking Images.

Robb’s posts kicked off a series of articles across tech media starting with Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine by Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman at Wired. It’s an interesting read and really helps dial in how much of a fuck these companies do not give to the open web, see Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly okay to steal content if it’s on the open web.

As someone who loves the web and enjoyes contributing to the open web, I’m uncomfortable with this open hostility and blatent disregard to myself and thousands of other webmasters across the open web. I feel the same as Starbreaker who isn’t holding back with posts like Personal Websites are for Personal Use.

It’s hard not to get down about this… I can feel a blog post coming on…

Anyway, that’s enough for now. Catch you on the flip side 🤙

Reply by email, XMPP, send a webmention, or say what's up in the guestbook.

No mentions yet.