Since I’m rebuilding all my hobby projects in Laravel, I also had to relaunch my website about dynamic energy pricing in The Netherlands. It gathers its EPEX pricing information information from the ENTSO-e transparency API.
Getting permission to use that API involves requesting a token via e-mail. Why they came up with that particular hurdle is a mystery to me.
I just noticed TractorFan has a profile on Grokipedia. While mostly factually correct, the article that their AI wrote is quite repetitive. It’s really fluffing up the content and as a result it’s not an entertaining read.
I started writing longer descriptions for the most popular tractors on our platform. The goal is to be engaging (for tractor fans, that is), while keeping it factual and neutral.
An example of this is the section about the John Deere 7810.
It’s very nice to be able to create truly useful and interesting pages, without the objective of selling something. I also like the collaborative aspect of it. The community can make corrections and add photos, videos, reviews and questions, making it a destination that is less dry than Wikipedia and more factual than any AI generated slop page.
After having my server absolutely pummeled to death by GPTBot, copying all content on all my websites without asking, this seems hypocritical on a whole other level:
We have observed accounts associated with DeepSeek employees developing methods to circumvent OpenAI’s access restrictions and access models through obfuscated third-party routers and other ways that mask their source.
If you have a Laravel project and think about using Sentry in production, there’s an amazing open source alternative that works great with Docker, out of the box: BugSink.
Self-host on your own servers and handle millions of events with no per-event billing. It saved my ass on multiple occasions now.
They offer a hosted plan if you want to avoid the hassle of self hosting. I’m not sponsored, they don’t have an affiliate program, it’s just awesome.
So today I added EarlyHints to my FrankenPHP application server. I use cookies to prevent sending them on every request. It’s one of many steps I had to take to compensate for the fact that Laravel, while awesome, is just not as quick as I want it to be.
My kids ask me to print out coloring pages about twice a week. That’s where I got the idea for:
By focusing on the agriculture, transportation and automotive sectors, it nicely aligns with the other websites I’m running.
Launched a new, non gccTLD domain name for the global tractor enthusiasts:
Also 301 redirected some older domains in that direction. And made the new domain the x-default in my hreflang cluster.
A bit of a gamble as it’s hard to predict how search engines will respond.
Bluesky is zo’n heerlijk platform als je van het oude Twitter houdt. Elk bedrijf met een X profiel zou gewoon moeten switchen. Je krijgt er ook gratis goede links bij, zoals hier:
Telkens als er nieuwe peilingen voor de Tweede Kamer verkiezingen uitkomen slaan mensen aan het rekenen met mogelijke coalities. Op basis van de Peilingwijzer van Tom Louwerse heb ik de Coalitie Simulator gemaakt, zodat mensen naar hartelust mogelijke Tweede Kamer coalities kunnen samenstellen.
