Tag: blogging

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On the Blaugust Discord, UltrViolet suggested that bloggers link their post titles to the permalinks so that it’s easy to just right-click, “Copy Link as Markdown,” and get a formatted link with the correct title. (I’ve noticed Orion includes this in its context menu, and there are extensions for Firefox and Chrome that add it.)

I’ve been using the publication date in the post footer as the permalink on all the 11ty-generated parts of my site since I first converted the Les Mis blog back in 2021. But I can’t remember why I made that decision. I’m 99% certain every WordPress theme I’ve used has linked the title (even this one, which links from the timestamp too). It wasn’t an example in eleventy-base-blog either.

My best guess is that I was just implementing the Fediverse’s convention of linking the timestamp to the permalink. But that’s almost certainly because all the Twitterlike services don’t have titles.

But in looking up linking conventions, I went down an interesting rabbit hole about rel="bookmark".

Anyway, it’s an obvious change for better usability, and I’ll be updating my templates ASAP. (Edit: it’s done!)

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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I know, I’m already doing 100 Days To Offload. And I’m on track! I’ve written 24 posts in the last two months, so I’m actually ahead! But a few days ago I found out about Blaugust, a challenge to publish daily and/or write 31 posts in the month of August.

I can’t resist the wordplay in the name!

100 Days doesn’t have any set themes, and Blaugust’s themes are optional. And apparently it’s a fairly laid-back challenge, so if I miss a day I don’t need to drop out.

So what the heck: I’ll aim for 31 posts this month and see how far I get.

Besides, it’ll help motivate me to catch up on book reviews.

As with 100 Days, for Blaugust I intend to include any new or substantially rewritten page on my site, not just the ones that show up here in the reverse-chronological feed. The way I see it, what matters is less the specifics of what counts as a blog, and more that I’m writing new stuff on a regular basis and putting it out there on my own website, not on corporate social media.

Time to start my Blaugust post list:

  1. This post.
  2. Legends of Amberland (game review)
  3. First the Migraine, Then the Headache
  4. FairEmail (app review)
  5. Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence
  6. Where to Put Your Permalink
  7. What is rel="bookmark"?
  8. TIL about Hybrid MBR/GUID Partitions
  9. Starfleet vs. Jean Valjean?
  10. The Prestige
  11. Eulogy for the Pixel 5
  12. Canon Camera Connect
  13. To Each This World (book review)
  14. Reusing the Sign: Com-On-Inn
  15. The Confidence Game (Maria Konnikova) (book review)
  16. Regarding Empathy
  17. Lunar Eclipse vs. Summer Gloom
  18. Sometimes Reality is Unrealistic
  19. A Month With The Fairphone 4
  20. A Month With /e/OS

September 1 Update

Well, I didn’t manage daily blogging past day 12, didn’t manage 31 posts in the month, and didn’t manage to kickstart my book review backlog as I’d hoped. I did manage to review two books I’d just read and a game I’d just finished, and I did finish a few older drafts.

But the bulk of what I wrote ended up being about tech troubles: 6 posts about my dying phone and replacing it, and another about an invisible disk partition, make up fully a third of this month’s posts. More if you include the rabbit-hole investigating a stock image that looked like AI but wasn’t.

I wanted to write about something else. And I got partway through some drafts. And then offline complications got in the way. And I never quite got back on track. Apparently even with a blogging challenge, I still don’t feel like posting filler just to post something.

On the last day I decided I didn’t have time to write about the busy weekend, but I could at least polish up the drafts I’d been working on all month about the new phone and its OS. I still want to write more about its camera, and include some photos, but that’ll have to wait for an update. And yes, this update probably could have been post 21 if I’d written it last night, but having missed the deadline, it felt more appropriate to include it here, so all my writing about this year’s Blaugust would be in one place.

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I recently added “Your LLM was trained on my blog” to the intro on my home page. I’m sort of being facetious, but it’s also true: my old site (hyperborea.org) has been in the Common Crawl data set for years, this blog has been online since 2002, and the major LLMs have used Common Crawl’s data in their training.

Way back when I switched to WordPress in 2003, one of the things I found annoying about it was that it would auto-convert punctuation from ASCII to “fancy” characters. Curly quotes, curly apostrophes, em-dashes instead of double-hyphens, ellipses…These were things that bugged the heck out of me when I saw them in broken emails and Word documents. Over the next year, seeing the difference it made in legibility, I came to appreciate real typography. Since then I’ve been happy to let WordPress, and later ClassicPress and Eleventy convert my plain typing.

Side note: I still have trouble using some apps with code snippets (ex: Apple Notes and Stickies), ’cause I haven’t figured out how to stop them from converting ASCII punctuation that means something in the code to Unicode punctuation that means something more specific in printed human language. Also, notice in that sentence that ClassicPress was smart enough to convert a straight up and down apostrophe used on a contraction to a curly apostrophe, and not to a curly single quote like it does with ‘here.’

Anyway, WordPress powers a huge amount of the web. I’ve seen stats bandied about such as 42% of all websites, 60% of content management systems, >50% of the top 10,000 websites (by some measure or another). The exact numbers aren’t important, it’s just important to know that a whole lot of the web uses WordPress to convert what people write into HTML pages for the web.

Now let’s get back to LLMs:

  • People think they can identify LLM-generated text because it tends to include em-dashes.
  • LLMs were trained on writing by actual people on the web.
  • A whole lot of that writing by actual people is presented by WordPress.
  • WordPress has auto-converted typography including em-dashes since 2003.
  • That means a large chunk of LLMs’ training data includes text by real people that uses real em-dashes.

“AI” doesn’t use em-dashes because real people don’t, it uses em-dashes because real people do [note: lots of swearing] (via).

The only place I can imagine it would be even a semi-reliable indicator would be in social media posts, on platforms where that kind of auto-conversion doesn’t happen. Even then, I can easily imagine someone writing a draft in Word, or copying a sentence or two from their WordPress post, or just hitting option+shift+hyphen on a Mac (or whatever the key combo is on Windows).

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I’m considering starting the 100 Days To Offload challenge to post 100 times to my personal blog over the next year. I’m going to include any new posts I make on my personal website, including the tech tips and reviews sections (which is where I’ve mostly been writing these days). I could mirror those posts over here, but that seems kind of silly, since they all show up in my main site’s feed anyway. (They’ll also get combined in the sitewide 100daysToOffload tag list.)

It’s been a while since I did one of these challenges. A long while: The last one was probably when I tried to do NaBloPoMo in 2018 (blog daily during November, sort of a companion challenge to NaNoWriMo) and dropped it after a few days. This one’s longer, but it’s a lot more flexible.

Though I am curious: across my whole website, how many posts have I made over the past year? Only nine on K2R (counting the update round-up, but not counting the individual posts I’ve updated), but it turns out I’ve written 96 reviews since May 23 last year (which is a lot more than I realized!) and 14 troubleshooting articles. So I guess I’ve got a decent shot at hitting 100 again!

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Way back in the year 2000, I bought a domain name to move my personal website from the school web server to someplace I could keep it visible after graduating. I picked Hyperborea.org from an adventure movie I’d seen years earlier, wanting something that sounded fantastic but wasn’t Atlantis, which had already been done to death (and besides, it was taken). In 2002, I set up the first version of this blog, running on b2/cafelog. At the time, Katie and I both posted here. She later moved to LiveJournal, then stopped blogging, then set up again at Feral Tomatoes.

Somewhere along the line I bought KVibber.com and set it up to redirect to my main site. Then in 2022 I rebuilt it as a simple Indieweb-style profile, figuring that while Hyperborea was a digital home, it really wasn’t a digital identity. I’ve been using that in various online profiles ever since, but kept most of the actual stuff on the existing site while I dithered over what to keep where.

Eventually I decided I wanted to move over to the newer domain.

The Eleventy parts were easy: I just needed to change some parameters and rebuild. The hand-crafted parts were relatively easy: global search and replace.

And of course redirecting each section to the new site as I moved it.

Search indexes are slowly shifting over. Google so far has decided to keep pointing to some of the older pages even though those pages redirect to the new ones.

The blog…is complicated. WordPress and ClassicPress use a database for some things and files for others. Plus I’m using the ActivityPub Plugin to make the blog visible on the Fediverse, which brings its own set of complications. I was relieved to see that copies of posts previously federated at the old site do in fact show up correctly on the new site’s Fediverse view.

One thing I decided on early on: I was going to use a subdomain this time instead of a folder, because too many things (some plugins, .well-known files, etc) assume your blog is running at the top level of the site.

I did a first pass Wednesday night to copy the files and database, set up the new config, run all those search-and-replace actions, and kick the metaphorical tires. Since then I’ve been spot-checking things here and there, and the new site seems fine so far.

I tried running the ActivityPub migration, but it doesn’t seem to have sent any followers over. And when I look at the old @kelson profile in Mastodon, it says it’s moving to…@kelson, instead of to @k2r. Most likely it’s either an incompatibility with ClassicPress or another problem with running in a subfolder. Update: I gave it another stab the next day, but it failed again. There were only about 5 followers, so I figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. I issued a self-destruct on the old ActivityPub view, waited for it to run, and set up the old site to redirect to the new one.

Better Late Than Never

I’m kicking myself for taking so long. I should’ve just moved wholesale over to KVibber.com back in 2022. By waiting until 2026, I’ve left the new location without proof of having existed before the slop era. (I’m still writing articles myself, not using an “AI,” so all the mistakes in this post are my own.) Unless someone looks up the old hyperborea.org version of a page on the Wayback Machine, but they shouldn’t have to know to do that.

But the old name is awkward and hard to spell, and apparently some of the creepy groups that have weird obsessions with the myths it came from are more substantial than the historical footnotes I thought they were back in the day.

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I’ve been meaning to disconnect from Jetpack for a while now. This seems like a good time to do it, and to finally clear out the older Tumblr and WordPress.com blogs I don’t use anymore.

Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools — 404 Media

It’s the kind of thing that you expect from Google or Facebook, or from any number of start-ups, but there’s been this sense that Automattic should know better — and with Tumblr being login-walled and ad-saturated, and the push to upsell in their WordPress plugins, and now this…it’s looking like they don’t.

I don’t think they’ve hit the “trust thermocline” yet, but selling user data is a pretty clear line.

As for AI access to the Firehose: My previous understanding of the firehose is that it’s basically an aggregation of what you’d see in a bunch of blogs’ public RSS feeds. Which, OK, fine. Analyze your heart out. Display my posts in your RSS reader. Just make sure private posts and comments don’t leak.

But LLM training isn’t the same as analytics, or showing a properly attributed post in a reader. And quietly changing the terms to allow more kinds of re-use on something most people using the service don’t know about? Not cool.

And not making it clear what is and isn’t included for which purposes? That breaks down trust.

Before this, I wasn’t worried about the Firehose. But now I’m not sure I can trust Akismet, never mind Jetpack, and I’m looking for a new spam filter.

Originally posted across several threads through my GoToSocial test site.

Update: Automattic did clarify that self-hosted blogs with Jetpack are not included in the training data. Only company-hosted blogs on Tumblr and WordPress.com. But I still uninstalled Jetpack from this site, just to be sure. Like I said, I’d been meaning to for a while.

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