Josh Wieder

As part of my consulting business I have a number of web servers I take care of. This morning, I woke up to receive a particularly crappy message related to one of those servers: possible DoS attack Awesome, right? Ever notice how you never get these sorts of messages between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM, Monday through Friday? So I tried to SSH into the target server, and was pleased to find I was able to connect. Relieved that this was likely a false alarm, I found this in the Apache logs: 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 146 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 146 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 146 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 403 5 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 403 5 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500

So I am looking around in one of Microsoft's websites for web development tips when I come across this: D'oh It's really one of the worst possible places to put one of those.

Just a brief note, I have started to run a few very low circulation advertisements for the site on Google and Bing. Mostly this is an experiment to test whether having an active, but ultimately unpaid, marketing campaign improves search engine results. I don't expect any big changes to the site, and I am not selling advertisements. As always, any business practices will continue to match those outlined in the Commitment page .

Blogging tips aren't really the focus of my website. However, I recently signed up for Bing's Webmaster Tools and encountered some difficulty in submitting the sitemap for my Blogger website, joshwieder.blogspot.com. It took me a bit of head banging before I figured out how to resolve it, thanks in no small part to the amount of guides on this issue that are just wrong on their face. So, for regular blog readers, this isn't as advanced as a lot of the articles here are, but it turned out to be such a nuisance and so ill-documented that I felt something had to be done . This guide will assume that you have already added your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and verified domain ownership, both of which work as advertised. At the time of this writing, Blogger primarily uses Atom 1.0 to publish site feeds - Blogger also relies on Atom for a dynamically generated sitemap. For Google's webmaster tools, I registered the following link, which populates an XML file that contains