Ask HN: Not yet published – should it be at all, HN?
medium.com
medium.com
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.
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 ....
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 , 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.