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Dark Visitors are all the AI crawlers that roam our websites, scraping text, graphics, and more to train language models and similar technologies. Not everyone likes that. That's why darkvisitors.com was created, a site that lists common user agents used by these crawlers.

Using these user agents, one can create a robots.txt file, a text file that crawlers refer to and which specifies whether and which resources of the websites they are allowed to access – at least theoretically. Whether they all adhere to it is questionable, but it's at least an attempt to keep crawlers in check.

Now, one can either compile such a robots.txt oneself, or use my new Kirby plugin for it. It accesses the Dark Visitors API once a day to retrieve the latest rules from there. This way, you stay up to date and don't have to worry about it yourself. Additionally, you can also add your own entries to supplement your own sitemap and rules.

The plugin is free and can be installed via the usual methods:

Dark Visitors - Maurice Renck

I have been working on the new major release of the IndieConnector plugin for quite some time now. The goal is to become independent from webmention.io and be able to receive and handle webmentions without relying on it.

Don't get me wrong, webmention.io is great, and I am happy it's there, and I am able to use it. But users always reach out to me because they struggle to set it up. The goal with my plugins always is that they should simply work. I want them to work with minimal effort on the user's side. Of course, there will always be things that have to be configured, but the plugin's core functionality should, in my humble opinion, work with a minimal set of configurations to be made.

So the next step for IndieConnector is "native" webmentions. Which means that you install the plugin, add an endpoint to your HTML head, and then everything works. If you want to do more, use webmention.io, fine-tune settings, etc., you can do that, but you don't have to.

Before Google became big, there were web directories. You could submit your own website there and assign it to a category. And then, with luck, you were found.

Modern search engines soon put an end to this by automatically indexing websites, and no one had to submit their website anywhere anymore. But these directories never completely disappeared.

Anyone with their own personal website can still submit to such directories and lists today and also discover other websites through them.

Here is a small list of lists - can't get much more meta than this!

"What is AI doing to us?" is one of the big questions currently circling many of us, especially those engaged in creative work. Will "AI" soon be writing all our texts? Do we even need illustrators anymore? Can AI not write the source code for that? Are they allowed to just collect all our data and make a product out of it?

Your podcasts just got a little more inclusive. As Apple introduces automatic transcripts the Podcaster plugin also comes with a new transcript feature which allows you do upload transcript files in VTT or SRT format and define a language to each file.

This way you can provide Apple (and others) with transcripts and do not have to rely on their automatic generation of those. Simply open the episode tab and you'll find a new field below the audio upload. As soon as you upload a transcript, those will be added to your RSS feed and are available for all players providing this functionality.

The latest update is available via composer or the Podcaster website.

Happy podcasting!