This content is protected against AI scraping.
ANNOUNCEMENT: I now have a Patreon page which lives at:
As you may have noticed I haven’t really been posting much on my blog on this website much recently. This has been for a number of factors including one important one which is that for a long time I’ve not been able to upload new media (photos, videos, audio) and have had to rely on links to places where such content is stored. This has been a major frustration and something my hosting provider has not really been able to help with. So I started looking at alternatives to WordPress.
At first I found out about a static website programme called Jekyll which is written in Ruby and I played around a bit with this and created a new website which I was going to use as an adjunct to this one. That website, called Wild-Type, was going to feature my blogging on topics related to the work I was doing more of, that is, ranger work and conservation. I still wanted to keep this website going as an outlet for my creative work and I still will as I won’t be removing this one any time soon. I also kept up a lot of updating while I was creating the Gaelic Psalm section in the Gaelic part of the website. I’ll still be doing that too, in fact watch out for a post tomorrow on the new lunar cycle.
The Wild-Type website I created also had a custom domain, wild-type.life, and so when I decided to set up a Patreon instead I used this for the Patreon.
Why Patreon?
I have been using Patreon for a while as a subscriber. Two musicians I know both set up very successful Patreon pages to make up for loss of opportunities during lockdown and also to eventually create thriving communities in their own right on the platform. After doing some workshops on one of them on Amplifying your Creative Vision (Vision Amp) it occurred to me that I could set up a Patreon as an alternative blog that would focus on similar topics to the one I had started with the Wild-Type website. I hadn’t got very far with this before I realised (partly due to a temp job I had at the Bodleian Library essentially doing data entry to train Large Language Models) that the content I would be putting on my blog and thus publicly available would just be more grist for the AI mill. So I stopped blogging (with the exception of this of course).
So instead I chose to blog but on a platform that would require a certain amount of involvement to get to the writing itself. In short, it is behind a paywall. Hopefully not an unreasonable one and I’m also aware that this will also exclude some from being able to benefit. However it will hopefully also exclude AI bots from scraping the content and offering it up as part of a model that some big corporation owns and offers literally no compensation in return. I’m very open to people who would like to read my posts to get in touch so we can work out a way for it to be within their reach and I hope that the audience that I reach will be REAL PEOPLE.
Don’t get me wrong about Large Language Models and AI. They are incredibly powerful tools and for a person like me, who is a bit of a geek at heart, utterly mind blowing. I use them myself and have even had chats with them to find out more about how they work from the horse’s mouth so to speak. But I really don’t want to be just making more content for them to suck in and spit out. It feels like exploitation.
So now I’ve laid this all out on the line in a public way, it will probably be picked up by a bot eventually. Or maybe it won’t if I add this page to my robots.txt file. Surely WordPress does that?
So ta-ta for now. And please come along for the journey at
if that is your thing. More info can be found there. Love y’all!
