There was a time that I posted my work in progress to the Web. Allowing other people to view my progress with The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe helped my motivation to continue steadily towards the completion of the project. And it worked; after eight years of intense work, overseen by virtual strangers, I published the book. And a number of other books, too.
In the meantime, the mega-corporations of the Internet decided to steal everything that has ever been posted online. Immediately understanding the implications to online creators, I took everything down. My working drafts no longer appear, therefore, except for in the archives of the Wayback Machine.
Now, after a period of relative calm, posting intermittently to my own Website for a couple of years, I decided to block every single Web-crawling bot I could name from scraping my work. They’re voracious thieves of human work. For now, it seems to have worked, and my appearance on Google searches has begun to sink off the front page. But how are people supposed to discover me and my work? I want to spread the word about Norwegian and other Scandinavian folktales and legends – perhaps even sell a few books (or lots of books).
Welcome to the solution to this quandry. A blogger site is always visible to its master’s eyes, so I will gain what little exposure may be given me. At the same time, it will function as a buffer between what I don’t mind the bots having access to and the material on my own site, which I prefer to keep from them. What I will post here will often link back to my site, therefore; humans may read some more over there, but (for as long as the corporate vultures respect robots.txt files) bots may not.