Jake Marsh A lot of the people reading this blog now aren’t people. They’re agents: Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and friends, fetching a page because somebody asked them a question. This week I spent an evening making Deallocated Objects nice to read for them (and for search engines while I was in there).
The blog is a static site served by nginx, so everything here is either a file generated at build time or a few lines of nginx config. No framework required.
Markdown For Every Post# #
HTML is a lot of noise for an agent to wade through. Every post now also exists as plain markdown. Add .md to any post URL:
Each file starts with a little YAML frontmatter (title, canonical URL, author, dates, a short description), then the post. The older posts were written in markdown to begin with, so the build just cleans those up and points their images at the self-hosted copies.
The nicer trick is content negotiation. If a client asks for markdown in its Accept header, it gets markdown from the normal URL, no .md needed. In nginx that’s a map plus one line per location:
Try it:
Two details matter here. Every response sends Vary: Accept, so a cache in the middle never hands HTML to an agent or markdown to a browser. And the .md responses send a Link: <...>; rel="canonical" header pointing at the HTML page, plus X-Robots-Tag: noindex, so Google doesn’t treat them as duplicate copies of every post.
llms.txt# #
/llms.txt is a plain markdown file at the root of the site that tells an agent what it’s looking at. Mine has a one-line summary of the blog, how to get markdown, where the feeds are, how I’d like posts cited, and a list of every post with a link to its markdown and a one-line summary.
There’s also /llms-full.txt, which is the full text of every post in one file (about 225 KB), and /index.md, which is the homepage as markdown. Every response also carries a Link header pointing at llms.txt, so an agent can find it without guessing.
robots.txt# #
Silence in robots.txt technically means “allowed”, but I’d rather be explicit. Mine allows everyone, then names the big ones explicitly (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and about a dozen more) and adds a Content-Signal line:
That’s the right call for a blog. I want to be cited. A product site might choose differently.
Feeds# #
The old Atom feed at /feed still works, and every entry now has a summary and a text/markdown alternate link. I also added a JSON Feed, where each item carries a _markdown_url (JSON Feed allows custom keys that start with an underscore).
Meta Tags# #
The old site had almost none of these, so every page got the full set:
- a real meta description, a canonical URL, a robots tag and
lang="en" - Open Graph and Twitter card tags, including
article:published_timeandmodified_time - JSON-LD structured data:
BlogPostingand a breadcrumb on every post, withWebSite,Blogand aPersonfor me on the index pages
The descriptions were sneakier than I expected. The old database stored a pre-made description for each post, but it had run the paragraphs together (“…your app.The RevealWhat do I mean…”) and a few contained raw <img> HTML. Now the build makes its summaries from the rendered post text instead.
Two more fixes from the old 2014 markup. The viewport tag had maximum-scale=1, which stops people from pinch-zooming on their phones, so that’s gone. And there was no og:image at all, so when I shared a post, X and Threads grabbed the first image on the page, which happens to be the Little Bites of Cocoa banner at the top. Every post has a proper 1200x630 preview card now.
IndexNow# #
Last, an IndexNow key and a script that pings Bing and friends whenever a post is published. Google doesn’t participate, but Bing’s index feeds a lot of AI search tools, so it’s worth a 30-line script.
None of this took long, and most of it is just files. If you have a blog, llms.txt and .md versions of your posts are a nice place to start. Here’s this post:
The rest of how this site is built is in the colophon.