Saw an interesting behavior in Claude Code

I have been working on a tool to access the sitemap of a news website to try to create feeds when the site does not provide feeds. The tool starts by reading the robots.txt file, which usually has a list of things that are “disallowed”. On one of the sites, it specifically included “Claude Code” in the “disallow” list. Claude told me that it could not run the tool, since it was on the disallow list, but I could run it, capture the output, then give it to Claude for further processing. This was the first time I have seen any “limit” imposed on Claude by itself – interesting!

Looking to reduce memory usage for WordPress sites

I migrated all of my websites from Bluehost to Opalstack this summer. I am on the Single Stack plan, which provides shared hosting with 1 GB of RAM. When I was on Bluehost, I never worried about how much memory was being used when a site was accessed. Since moving to Opalstack, I noticed that there were times when individual WordPress sites would use up to 500 MB of memory. I also have several Node.js apps running which take memory from this 1 GB limit. Most of the time, there is not a problem, but when one of these WordPress memory spikes happens, my account hits the 1GB limit, and all of my Node.js apps are stopped.

I have done some tuning of the Node.js apps, but decided to look at the WordPress sites. I tried using a caching plugin on my main site, but had problems with it, so I disabled the plugin. With Claude’s help, I took the following initial steps to address the memory usage:

From the Opalstack Dashboard, changed FPM Max Child Threads setting from 30 to 14
In each of the WordPress site folders, edited .user.ini to change memory_limit from 256M to 96M

I will monitor my usage to see if this helps.

More gripes about RSS feeds from newspaper websites

I am continuing work on my Feed News Archive project, adding feeds from US newspaper websites. There is a combination of sites that do not offer feeds, sites with difficult ways to access feeds, some WordPress VIP sites that block access to their feeds (?!) and one (Seattle Times) that seems to only allow access to feeds via a web browser – ugh! To get around this, I am looking into news sitemaps as a way to create feeds for sites, then subscribe to those feeds. It’s more work than I want to do, but I am pressing on.

Dave Winer talks about how to create a standard in 2026, but offers RSS.chat as the standard being described. I don’t buy it. Is this project leading to developing a standard for chat networks? I don’t think so….can anyone help me out here?

This story about a pop-up restaurant in Woodstock NY (via Daveverse) is puzzling. My takeaway is that they did not have enough staff – did people not want to work in Woodstock?