Add Markdown export for blog posts to serve AI agents#15
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mattarderne wants to merge 2 commits intomasterfrom
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Add Markdown export for blog posts to serve AI agents#15mattarderne wants to merge 2 commits intomasterfrom
mattarderne wants to merge 2 commits intomasterfrom
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Reference Dries Buytaert's concept about AI agents being the third audience for web content, connecting it to the agent tool-building work discussed in the post.
- Add Jekyll plugin to generate .md versions of each blog post - Add <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"> hint in HTML head - Update blog post to document the implementation Inspired by https://dri.es/the-third-audience
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Summary
This PR adds support for serving blog posts as clean Markdown to AI agents and crawlers, inspired by Dries Buytaert's concept of "the third audience." This improves the experience for AI tools that consume web content by eliminating HTML noise and providing structured, parseable input.
Changes
_plugins/markdown_pages.rb): New generator that creates.mdversions of all blog posts at build time, with an option to exclude specific posts via front matter_layouts/postside.html): Addedrel="alternate"link tag withtype="text/markdown"to signal the availability of Markdown versions to crawlerswriting/rdrn/_posts/2025-12-31-ai-agents.md): Added "The Third Audience" section explaining the motivation, implementation, and implications of this approachImplementation Details
exclude: trueto front matter.mdextension (e.g.,/post-slug.md)Rationale
AI agents struggle with parsing messy HTML containing navigation, sidebars, and other wrapper elements. Serving clean Markdown reduces token waste in LLM context windows and improves tool accuracy. This is a low-effort experiment to see if cleaner inputs lead to better attribution and more accurate AI-generated responses.
https://claude.ai/code/session_01U3YTcmTDVmjAQMEq2HjXMN