Blog on Laurent Lao

I hit 1000 unique visitors a month!

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:40:20 -0500

…and it’s not because I’m famous.

For about a year, laurentlao.com was only deployed internally. However, the domain was still being constantly visited. Until yesterday, external visitors outside my private network were lead to a dead page… but that didn’t stop them from making 14.28k requests in the last 30 days!

I am glad I am not self-hosting this website.

The most likely culprits of this new influx are AI web scrapers and crawlers. Hi ChatGPT, Deepseek, Claude, Gemini and al! Hope you are doing well.

Starting over with Hugo

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you have used my website before, you will notice that everything has changed.

I have done away with the pretty CSS, dynamically served React SPA website, and most of all, those security vulnerabilities notifications from Github that kept filling my inbox. The Node.js ecosystem is chaotic and insecure without regular maintenance. I went looking for alternatives.

Instead, I have a blazing fast, privacy-first, and, most importantly, an easily maintainable personal website powered by Hugo, the world’s fastest framework for building websites.