FeedCity

just setting up my srvr

“Why don’t you put your site behind Cloudflare to deal with those LLM bots?”

Okay, they’re back – that was quick this time… 😁

Lately, I have been writing a lot over on Gadget Wisdom, where I write more tech themed stories, about self-hosting. That isn’t exactly uncommon, it is a popular topic for many people. But what does that do in relation to my longstanding practice of working on tools for my w...

Last week I ran a meetup for writers on the web. During the session, I brought up the topic of distance in writing. [1] We explored the topic in various ways – the distance between writing and publishing, the distance between reader and writer, how distance varies. As I write...

I was thinking about a design for a web page yesterday that I wanted to build with a few illustrations. I remembered that there was a site with old-timey illustrations that were available in the public domain. I thought I have no idea how to find this website! Today,, I was both surprised and delighted that the search query “old timey illustrations” allowed me to find the site, which I now know is called Old Book Illustrations. It is amazing that I can type in a query like “old timey illustrations” into a web search engine and find the page for which I am looking. The speed with which I found the website for which I was looking – and how a search engine found the page with my description "old timey" – brought a smile to my face. Addendum: It looks like not all illustrations are public domain according to the Terms of Use, but this doesn't detract from the story :)

Every so often I open developer tools in the web browser and start tinkering with my website. I love experimenting with different design directions, not necessarily in pursuit of a complete design so much as fuelled by a sense of curiosity. What would it look like if I made m...

Today the IndieWeb community hosted a Create Day event in which participants were invited to make something on the web. The theme of the event was “Build Don't Buy”, an invitation to make something this Black Friday. While I wasn’t sure what I wanted to make, I knew I wanted...

I just added “Polaroid” to the list of film formats to my focal length equivalents site.

If you’re into #audio #plugins: Universal Audio is giving away a free plugin right now – options include many classics like the LA-2A, 1176, Pultec EQ, Galaxy Tape Echo, the (great-sounding!) PolyMAX Synth, and more. 🎛️✨
https://www.uaudio.com/products/pick-one-free-plug-in

My son was just trying to find the right tempo for a song he’s playing on the violin. So I started to clap in time.

I’m his dadronome.

🤔 https://www.netcup.com/en/deals/black-friday

It feels really wrong – and also a bit naive and crude – that I am now forced to block individual IPs and even countries like CN, RU, or UA (💙💛) to mitigate the current LLM bot “DDoS attack” on my site. This shouldn't be something I have to do manually in my .htaccess IMHO—that’s firewall territory.

In my current shared web hosting setup, I am not “owning” my web enough to be able to change server settings, access more detailed monitoring tools, or try tools like Anubis (https://anubis.techaro.lol/). So I’ll probably tackle a move of my website to a managed server very soon. 😅

Alright – my site seems to be working again for now. After I added a few filter rules to my .htaccess that block a few countries with high bot and spam traffic (like CN, RU, BY, KP, IR) as well as quite a few IPs of LLM bots and crawlers, the all-inkl.com support team removed their filter again! So I'm happy to report that my site should be accessible from countries like Canada, the Netherlands, Czechia, and Costa Rica again. 😊

Somehow, I'm still seeing an error for Coventry, UK when checking with https://check-host.net/. But I’m writing this from a London (VPN) IP address and just opened my site, holding a teacup. So I hope my friends in the UK can access the site again as well? Or is the site returning “🫖”? 🧐

Anyway, glad everything seems to be working for now. Although it feels weird to have to mitigate and manage this stuff myself in the .htaccess…
Good night, everyone! And thanks for all the kind replies and the suggestions! 🤗💚

@hdv is right: it’s the LMM bots that are bombarding my site with traffic. I mean, look at November 19th – what a day! 🤯 (look at the number of lines on the left)

That’s great news! I can just write an invoice to Sam and friends. ☺️ My son suggested “how about one cent per LLM bot request”…

Their support team replied:

“Your website matthiasott.com is being accessed continuously and massively.”

That’s … great!! 🎉🥳

“It is likely a DDoS attack. We have installed a filter that only allows access from certain countries to protect the server from overload.”

That’s … not so great. 🤔😂