Quick Luddite Notes

🌐☢️ Please change the URL used to read these notes!

These “Quick Luddite Notes” are hosted on the bearblog.dev platform, which is run by a single person who was generous enough to offer free hosting for the text part (Markdown) of the blogs. Users need to pay to host images, to add scripts to pages, and to be able to further customize their Bear Blog sites.

The most severe limitation, though, is the fact that such free blogs are not indexed by search engines!

Herman Martinus, the 34-year-old creator and owner of this platform, had to fight in the past with Google, which blacklisted the whole of the bearblog.dev domain due to one “bad” blog. In his own words, “people can post some pretty horrific stuff,” and “paying for something is a great way to make people respect a space.” Fair enough.

I already pay for ludditus.com to IONOS, and these quick notes are a lightweight way to post some quick thoughts (and frustrations). So no, I won’t pay for them!

What I don’t find to be completely fair is that every single page hosted without payment (free rides are communism!) on bearblog.dev has this meta tag injected, and it overrides robots.txt:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

Yes, it decreases the traffic, thus the strain on the server. Yes, it prevents web crawlers from indexing the “horrific stuff” some people (or AI agents) might be posting.

But any page that exists on the Web is meant to be known. A website that is ignored by search engines does not exist! Sure, there are people who bookmark me and visit me, and I don’t run ads, so I don’t need visits for the sake of having visits. Today’s people are so lazy that they don’t bother to leave a comment on ludditus.com. No “thank you” nor “fuck you.” No “what a shitload of crap” or “you’re wrong in this regard.” I have visitors on ludditus.com coming from all search engines and from a couple of chatbots. Did they find what they were looking for? In most cases, apparently not.

To allow Google (among others) to index these experimental notes, I decided to add a thin proxy on my blog that would strip the “noindex, nofollow” tag if a page is accessed through it!

Therefore, you are kindly asked to REMOVE THE OLD BOOKMARKS, if you had them, and USE THE NEW ONES that will be indexed by crawlers:

🔴 Instead of these:

🟢 Use these:

On “Homo Ludditus,” I updated the top link to the notes and the bottom-right link to the RSS feed. I hope nothing is broken.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.