Blog

Matthias has written a wonderful post about AI scrapers. Many of us website owners are currently facing the situation of being overrun by bots and crawlers. This goes so far that our sites become unusable because they are either completely overloaded or because the hosting provider has blocked entire countries, as in Matthias's case.

When we reformed our band 25 years ago, we named it "Division By Zero." I don't remember why. We played gigs in and around Hamburg and released an album on CD. Spotify and the like were still a long way off.

A few years later, a band formed in Poland, also called "Division By Zero," and they also played live and released CDs. They were more successful than us. So, if you searched for a band with that name, you'd quickly find a lot of them and very little of us.

This text by JA Westernberg is, for me, the best I've read about blogging so far. It doesn't even have to be limited to blogging; it could also cover other forms of websites.

These two paragraphs in particular resonated with me:

Over the past few days, I've often pondered how to summarize the past year. Many adjectives have come to mind, but none quite fit. “Tiring,” however, seems to be the best description.

This is largely due to the sheer volume of things happening around us. I avoid doomscrolling, but I'm also not someone who can—or wants to—ignore these things.