I recently redesigned my website¹. It was originally a static site generated by Zola and hosted on Netlify, which hosts static websites for free. After recently completing a Udemy Phoenix/Elixir course, I decided I wanted to redesign my website and do so using Phoenix and Elixir, to get some practice. This meant paying for a web server to host my application 😬 Fortunately, this was cheaper than I thought, and a droplet only cost me $5/month.

Setting up a live web server for the first time led to a surprise when GET requests started coming in to my server within minutes, for nonexistent URLs like https://taylor.gl/phpmyadmin. My website doesn’t even use PHP, so what gives? I originally thought my girlfriend, who uses PHPMyAdmin for work and knew I was launching my web server for the first time, had somehow accidentally mixed URLs or typed the “phpmyadmin” part of the URL while on mental auto-pilot. Nope. Turns out, someone was trying to hack me. Or some robot was, anyway — and still is. After digging around on the internet, I found out that such automated hacking attempts are not only common but ubiquitous. I would not have been so surprised if the attempt came in a month after starting my server or something, but this was on the first day.

Paying attention to the server logs also let me notice requests not only to https://taylor.gl/rss.xml but also to https://taylor.gl/static/rss.23a67eb85f.xml, which I assume was a URL generated by Netlify on my original website. I have now altered the new version of my website to also serve the RSS file at this URL, so as not to break whoever’s RSS reader has been making these requests. If that RSS reader was yours: Hi! 👋

This website ↩

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