Future-proofing my blog for an AI audience
• ~400 words • 2 minute read
There is nothing more meta than blogging about your blog, but I had to start somewhere after a six-month hiatus.
Let's cut to the chase. I've been thinking a lot about LLMs and llmstxt.org in particular. Although LLMs are pretty darn good at reading HTML and parsing meaning between the brackets, it still seems to do best when the source is as close to plain-text as possible.
So I made a few changes to facilitate this and make the plain-text versions more discoverable:
- Every blog post has a plain-text and Markdown variant. Just add
.mdor.txtto the end of the post URL to see it. - I've added
<link rel="alternate" type="text/plain">and<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">to the<head>of the HTML for these posts to make it more discoverable. - I added also added links to the end of each post, for the kind of nerds that appreciate that sort of thing, as well as dedicated RSS (plain|markdown) and JSON (plain|markdown) feeds that will link directly to these versions if you want
It all makes sense to me. What's good for us tends to be good for the machines: legibile systems, up-to-date documentation, well organized projects, etc. I have a whole separate article in the back of the brain about trying understand why an industry is open to treating machines better than we treat ourselves. These same tools and affordances make people more productive too.
My favorite little trick was this Nunjuck loop to match the length of the title for a given post with enough "=" characters to visually underline it:
{{ post.data.title }}
{% for i in range(0, post.data.title | length) -%}={% endfor %}
So the end result for the plain-text version looks like this:
Future-proofing my blog for an AI audience
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Silly, little things that make me happy.
You might be asking why is there plain-text version and a Markdown version when the plain-text version looks like... Markdown...
That... is a great question. I kind of improvised this evening and will probably go back to the drawing board on that concept. The Markdown files as they are currently serve are literally how my posts are stored. The plain-text versions are formatted a little bit differently (i.e no frontmatter).
On a different note, my professional obligations have recently changed and I have some free-time on my hands. I want to write about that and reflect on all the things I've learned, but mostly I want to use this time to rebuild the discipline of writing more. Technology, travel stories, creative explorations, opinions and even metacommentary about how I've constructed this blog.
--Published on Wednesday, June 11th 2025. Read this post in Markdown or plain-text.