
Ask HN: Not yet published – should it be at all, HN? - datalist
https://medium.com/@neroux/417c7fdab282
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brudgers
I read it on HN. It is already published. My thoughts.

1\. Shorter.

2\. Outline like a technical document. It's about Apache more than robots.

3\. The robots.com sockpuppet laying on a keyboard is the wrong direction for
an article. Maybe it's fine for a conference talk, to add visual interest,
here it's just in the way in a readers way. Conference talks are one form of
exhibitionism and narcissism. Writing is a different form.

4\. Put yourself in the article by telling your story. That's the other arc --
the non-technical literary one. It's more interesting than sarcasm. Even a
reader with dial-up can get that anywhere.

5\. Don't use numbered lists.

5\. Good luck.

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datalist
Temporarily published, unless someone made a copy ;)

Thanks a lot for your input. Actually already pretty short for an average
Medium article. As for 2) its about recognising patters in HTTP, not so much
about Apache. You can apply such rules with most other servers as well.

As for one of the fives, wasnt there something about sarcasm, bullet points
and vandalism ....

------
dalke
Does it matter if it's published?

BTW, checking for the referer header content will cause some browsers to fail,
depending on the mode. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer#Referer_hiding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer#Referer_hiding)
, which lists some of the reasons for why a browser might send a blank value.

The check that the User Agent contains "Mozilla 5.0" will cause text-mode
users (eg, links) to fail. While not popular, I use links to download some
tar.gz files from sourceforge and a few other places because it's easier to
start the download that way than get the actual download URL through a
graphical browser.

