Robb Knight
rknight.me · Personal blog · on HN since 2021
Robb Knight writes about personal websites, RSS, bots, nginx, macOS fixes, and small apps like TrackerZapper.
What HN saysHN commenters cite his finding that Perplexity misstates its user agent, which sparked debate, and link his posts on styling RSS feeds.
17HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
20stories submitted
929story points
3 months agolast shared
2021people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent2 people · 626 points · first shared 2024 · 533 comments on HN
- 2Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should2 people · 132 points · first shared 2024 · 135 comments on HN
- 3Please, Expose Your RSS2 people · 10 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 4TrackerZapper: Remove tracking parameters from any links you copy2 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 5Blocking bots with nginx2 people · first shared 2024
- 6The Web Is Fantastic1 people · 141 points · first shared 2023 · 24 comments on HN
- 7I'm (Not) Building a Podcast Host1 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 8Using Eleventy to Gobble Up Everything I Do Online1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 9Everybody's Free (To Make Websites)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 10Highlighting Journalism with the Fediverse Creator Tag1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 11Everything Should Have an API: I'm Done with Closed Services1 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 12Fix for Slow Open and Save Dialog on macOS1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 13Using Setapp1 people · 1 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 14Shutting Down EchoFeed1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 15Using the 8BitDo Keyboard on macOS1 people · 1 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
arccy · 2025-06-27
it works, i think the most visible ones are where people style their atom / rss feeds instead of rendering separate xml / html pages https://rknight.me/blog/styling-rss-and-atom-feeds/
ceejayoz · 2024-07-17
AI scrapers are pretty widely ignoring robots.txt, and plenty lie about their user agents. https://rknight.me/blog/perplexity-ai-is-lying-about-its-user-agent/
I'd fully expect OpenAI to do some checks that their bot isn't getting different responses than a seemingly real request.
briantakita · 2024-06-15
> What is this post about https://rknight.me/blog/blocking-bots-with-nginx/
He is asking Perplexity to summarize a single page. This is simply automation for opening a browser, navigating to that URL, copying the content, pasteing the content into Perplexity.
This is not automated crawling or indexing. Since the person is driving the action. An automated crawler is driven into action by a bot.
Nor is this article added into the foundational model. It's simply in a person's session context.
If for some reason, the community deems this as automated crawling or indexing. One could write an extension to automate the process of copying the article content & pasting the content into an LLM/Rag like Perplexity.
lolinder · 2024-06-15
Because that's literally what the author does in TFA and then complains about when Perplexity complies.
> What is this post about https://rknight.me/blog/blocking-bots-with-nginx/
LeoPanthera · 2021-11-29
Don't forget TrackerZapper to strip tracking codes from copied URLs: https://rknight.me/apps/tracker-zapper/