I was asked before (online). And yes, I do know (almost precisely) the bot to human ratio for my sites. My audience in the real is known and small, and online discovery limited (search engines). I don’t need to look at the metrics per se.

I’m not exactly fond of the .md but a long time ago, I added inconspicuous Markdown links to one of my blogs. I tend to get these funny hunches.

Do you really think humans are clicking the .md? My running theory is that browser agents are programmed to consume less tokens.

I’ll be 502’ing my repositories for a bit. Use private or public mirrors in the mean time. Most of the stuff on there is in sloppy mode, so you won’t miss them.

I can eat goofy bot traffic, but my curiosity wants to be satisfied and I’m itching to do some data gathering and analysis. It turns out that sending a blanket 502 causes the metadata to arrive even faster (bots go crazy).

One of the glorious things about self hosting truly personal stuff, is that you can just turn off your server(s). There is no pressure to keep anything up.

I was told that it’s great that there’s lots of links here. Links are kind of a chore, but an obsessive habit (from academic times). There’s some semi automation happening but the main downsides are:

1. Checking if they still work
2. Checking if relevancy hasn’t changed

The other con || pro (take your pick):

3. Friends more in the know, may dissect && tear you a new one when the content and the link disagree (with reality).

Insanely knowledgeable people are also out there online too. On occasion, when I bother with emails, I always end up learning extremely fascinating stuff.

My SEO strategy is heretical. Search engine rankings accelerate spam from 0 to 100, so I keep a % of my sites' content unindexed. This violates incentives and makes for a good bot repellent. A search console’s sole purpose is to confirm the “efficacy”.

Writing or linking can also be risky or get you DMCA’d (it’s an angry world). If SEO is not a priority, then there’s maximum freedom. My technical friends and the curious know how to find things anyway.