A note on unblocking robots, shedding the cipher, and SSG regrets.

I'm sick of whispering into an encrypted void that only three bored web crawlers and my own neurotic back-ups ever touch.

For years the default setting has been paranoia: block every bot in robots.txt, lock the gates, write in half-formed code and local grudges that require a background check and two stiff drinks to decipher. It's a comfortable cage. If nobody can read what you're saying, nobody can tell you you're wrong, or worse, uninteresting.

I keep changing this site and I keep breaking it. I should have just left it in plain, simple HTML. Instead, I got hooked on Static Site Generators and started hopping around like an idiot: Jekyll, then 11ty, then Hugo, and now Zola. Every time I moved, lazy me tried using quick scripts to automate the migration. Half the media attachments vanished into broken relative links, and a chunk of old posts just dissolved into frontmatter errors.

Anyway. I gotta be careful hereafter.

I'm trying to break character.

I want to write some shit that anyone off the street can actually read without needing a glossary of my personal failures. Real sentences. Plain observations. Public entries that don't look like an emergency room triage report.

So I'm not going to keep blocking all the robots in robots.txt for everything anymore. If something is meant for public eyes, let the crawlers take it. To keep track of this compromise (this bowdlerized, accessible layer) I'm tagging these entries under ad-usum-delphini or expurgatus. For the use of the public. Sanitized not because I care about polite company, but because I want the words to actually land somewhere outside my own skull.

The rest of the dumpster fire stays buried behind the usual disclaimers. But this door stays unlatched.

Image Credit: Egbert codex.jpg via Wikimedia Commons