Oct 08, 2026
When I started the blog, I thought about a few posts that I would make. And one of them is this one: a post about access to a blog I didn’t advertise.
I didn’t feel like going to forums in the Internet posting links to any new blog post I’d write. But without doing something like that, no-one would find it, right? I guess so, so I decided to check. My main goal with the blog wasn’t to get people to know what I’m doing - that would be nice, don’t get me wrong. The thing about “if at least one person learnt something new here would make it worth” actually feels true. But the main goal was to improve my own writing skills. So I needed to write - if someone reads, it’s a bonus!
There was another question though: how would I know that someone actually did see the blog? This blog is hosted on Cloudflare, and they provide some stats about the pages, but I totally expect anyone who finds my blog due its content - mainly Zig and Zephyr - would use an ad blocker, so the tracking wouldn’t show them. And the chances that someone that I actually know would find it and tell me are pretty low, so I’d probably never know. Another possibility would be someone that finds it posting links to some forum that I’m also watching, which seems unlikely as well. I mean, if the owner of the blog is not posting about it on forums, why would someone do it? It is the case for already known bloggers, of course, but not for unknown strangers.
However, I didn’t completely hid the blog. I linked to it from my GitHub account, LinkedIn and even added to the Internet Archive, so it would have some links out there, where the bots could find it.
The bots did find it. And even before I posted any link to personal profiles or Internet Archive. At first, security related crawlers, like censys.io and internet-measurement.com. I guess they watch for DNS updates and start doing their things. Unknown and suspicious bots also appeared. Lots of them trying to find stuff like CMS admin pages, .git directories. The Internet is indeed a dangerous place, huh?
After adding the links, I saw the first search engine crawlers1 accessing it. And after a few weeks, I noticed that searches for “zig zephyr” on Google and others started showing the blog in the first page - initially, down below. But I checked recently and it is moving up2. Nice!
Another interesting thing is how the AI scrappers are hungry: they are frequent, not more than the ones trying to find security issues (to alert? to exploit?), but certainly more than search engine ones. I’m glad I’m not hosting this on my machine =D
I won’t be trying to be discreet about the blog anymore, but won’t be shamelessly plugging it everywhere. In my last search for “zig zephyr” I actually found some interesting stuff people are doing out there. Maybe it’s time to reach them to collaborate?
In the end, I got what I wanted: some topic to discuss in the blog!
One final detail: as soon as I uploaded the first blog post, the Cloudflare tracker showed 14 web access - the one that shows info collected by its tracker. How? It wasn’t me, as I use an ad blocker, and even if I had disabled it for tests, Cloudflare dashboard still shows access from Windows, which I don’t use. Would it be someone on Cloudflare doing some manual inspection on stuff published by a new user? A fluke? Will I ever know?
According to Cloudflare dashboard, I hope they know what they are doing =D ↩
I checked those using browser’s incognito mode to avoid search engines bias due to their tracking. And also used services like DuckDuckGo, which should not do tracking. ↩