Simon Willison’s Weblog

Last month I added a feature I call beats to this blog, pulling in some of my other content from external sources and including it on the homepage, search and various archive pages on the site.

On any given day these frequently outnumber my regular posts. They were looking a little bit thin and were lacking any form of explanation beyond a link, so I've added the ability to annotate them with a "note" which now shows up as part of their display.

Here's what that looks like for the content I published yesterday:

I've also updated the /atom/everything/ Atom feed to include any beats that I've attached notes to.

# 23rd March 2026, 2:13 am / atom, blogging, site-upgrades

I've long been resistant to the idea of accepting sponsorship for my blog. I value my credibility as an independent voice, and I don't want to risk compromising that reputation.

Then I learned about Troy Hunt's approach to sponsorship, which he first wrote about in 2016. Troy runs with a simple text row in the page banner - no JavaScript, no cookies, unobtrusive while providing value to the sponsor. I can live with that!

Accepting sponsorship in this way helps me maintain my independence while offsetting the opportunity cost of not taking a full-time job.

To start with I'm selling sponsorship by the week. Sponsors get that unobtrusive banner across my blog and also their sponsored message at the top of my newsletter.

I will not write content in exchange for sponsorship. I hope the sponsors I work with understand that my credibility as an independent voice is a key reason I have an audience, and compromising that trust would be bad for everyone.

Freeman & Forrest helped me set up and sell my first slots. Thanks also to Theo Browne for helping me think through my approach.

# 19th February 2026, 5:44 am / newsletter, blogging, troy-hunt, site-upgrades

A few months ago I added a tool to my blog for bulk-applying tags to old content. It works as an extension to my existing search interface, letting me run searches and then quickly apply a tag to relevant results.

Since adding this I've been much more aggressive in categorizing my older content, including adding new tags when I spot an interesting trend that warrants its own page.

Today I added system-prompts and applied it to 41 existing posts that talk about system prompts for LLM systems, including a bunch that directly quote system prompts that have been deliberately published or leaked.

Other tags I've added recently include press-quotes for times I've been quoted in the press, agent-definitions for my ongoing collection of different ways people define "agents" and paper-review for posts where I review an academic paper.

# 19th July 2025, 2:02 am / blogging, tagging, site-upgrades

I've added a Disclosures section to my about page, listing my various sources of income and the companies that directly sponsor my work or have supported it in the recent past.

I do not receive any compensation writing about specific topics on this blog - no sponsored content! I plan to continue this policy. If I ever change this I will disclose that both here and in the post itself. [...]

I see my credibility as one of my most valuable assets, so it's important to be transparent about how financial interests may influence my writing here.

I took inspiration from Molly White's disclosures page.

# 23rd June 2025, 6:06 pm / blogging, molly-white, site-upgrades

Subscribe to my sponsors-only monthly newsletter

I’ve never liked the idea of charging for my content. I get enormous value from putting all of my writing and research out there for free.

So I’m trying something a little different: pay me to send you less.

I’m starting a sponsors-only monthly newsletter featuring just my heavily curated and edited highlights. If you only have ten minutes, what are the most important things not to miss from the last month?

Don’t want to pay? That’s fine, you can continue to follow my firehose for free!

Anyone who sponsors me for $10/month (or $50/month or more) on GitHub sponsors will receive my new newsletter on approximately the last day of the month. I’ll be sending out the first edition next week.

This blog and my newsletter will continue at their same breakneck pace. Paying subscribers can get a lower volume of stuff.

I'm cautiously optimistic that this could work. I've never liked the idea of business models that incentivize me to publish less. This feels like it encourages me to do what I'm doing already while giving people a rational reason to support my work, at a relatively small incremental cost to myself.

# 25th May 2025, 6:06 am / projects, blogging, github, email, newsletter, site-upgrades

Fun fact: there's no rule that says you can't create a new blog today and backfill (and backdate) it with your writing from other platforms or sources, even going back many years.

I'd love to see more people do this!

(Inspired by this tweet by John F. Wu introducing his new blog. I did this myself when I relaunched this blog back in 2017.)

# 25th April 2025, 3:30 pm / blogging, site-upgrades

I've added a new content type to my blog: notes. These join my existing types: entries, bookmarks and quotations.

A note is a little bit like a bookmark without a link. They're for short form writing - thoughts or images that don't warrant a full entry with a title. The kind of things I used to post to Twitter, but that don't feel right to cross-post to multiple social networks (Mastodon and Bluesky, for example.)

I was partly inspired by Molly White's short thoughts, notes, links, and musings.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but the amount of work involved in modifying all of the parts of my site that handle the three different content types was daunting. Then this evening I tried running my blog's source code (using files-to-prompt and LLM) through the new Gemini 2.5 Pro:

files-to-prompt . -e py -c | \
  llm -m gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 -s \
  'I want to add a new type of content called a Note,
  similar to quotation and bookmark and entry but it
  only has a markdown text body. Output all of the
  code I need to add for that feature and tell me
  which files to add  the code to.'

Gemini gave me a detailed 13 step plan covering all of the tedious changes I'd been avoiding having to figure out!

The code is in this PR, which touched 18 different files. The whole project took around 45 minutes start to finish.

(I used Claude to brainstorm names for the feature - I had it come up with possible nouns and then "rank those by least pretentious to most pretentious", and "notes" came out on top.)

This is now far too long for a note and should really be upgraded to an entry, but I need to post a first note to make sure everything is working as it should.

# 26th March 2025, 6:11 am / blogging, projects, gemini, ai-assisted-programming, claude, molly-white, files-to-prompt, site-upgrades