Ducks, Hanging Hats, and Rust

~ Veselin

My daily walk in Sofia was in rusty areas.

I saw a duck, which is quite uncommon for my neighborhood. We mostly have crows, rooks, magpies, jays and other related crow-ish species. I didn’t even know this mini-river existed, it starts nowhere and ends nowhere. It’s walled by layers of rusty walls. I’m not sure if I can even legally reach it without trespassing some abandoned or poorly maintained industrial lot.

Found some hats along the way.

The orange friend is Pesho, already featured here as Son of a Mother.

The weather was nice and helped me get to 15K steps.

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Published by Veselin

I ❤️ WordPress

14 thoughts on “Ducks, Hanging Hats, and Rust”

  1. Nature finds a way.

    Hey, Veselin, can you offer some guidance on getting rid of the bots? A lot of folks on WordPress are getting scraped mercilessly. Back in the day somebody told me how to restrict my site (it might have been you, and it seems to be working, or else I’m uninteresting to bots) but I can’t find the permission now. Do you know where it’s located in the menu? I feel like this is important knowledge to share.

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    1. It’s under Settings -> Reading. There are two checkboxes under “Your site is visible to everyone.”

      The first will make your site disappear from Google and you’ll lose a significant % of your traffic and some mildly evil bots.

      The second will make your content unavailable to ChatGPT.

      Neither will impact the million rogue AI startups, mercilessly crawling the web to train models. But those bots are evil and behave like real users, ignore the instructions, and are not easy to block. Maybe there’s a specialized plugin that will do the trick.

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      4. Thanks, my recommendation would be to only use the second checkbox. Google is still mostly useful, despite the AI overview. It sends some traffic. Not as much as it used to but it’s better than nothing.

        As for blocking the chinese bots, the TikTok AI and likes, I don’t know. I’ll need to research that, it’s not my area of expertise.

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      5. I get some hits from Google. The second one is what I have mine set at, and it seems to be working so far, at least with the current bot incursion some of the others I follow are dealing with, so I thought I’d let them know about it. In the end, we can all tell who the real people are, and they’re the ones who matter.

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      6. How do you know it’s bot incursion?

        I’ve had a few very suspicious traffic spikes, and both were caused by links to images. Apparently I published a great photo of the tallest building in Sofia.

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  2. We’re publishing some short stories right now: a few of the authors have seen viewership spikes in the 10,000 to 30,000 range over the past month. (Normally we get double digits per day at best) Now I wish this was for real, but it just ain’t.

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