Which editor?

Notepad or editor in UNIX

[Bali_Freak]

An article reviewing problems with robots.txt mentions this;

"Another common mistake, is editing your robots.txt in DOS mode. Although it is such a common problem, that we are sure search engines account for it, it is bad practice. Always edit your robots.txt in UNIX mode and upload in ASCII. Many FTP clients will make the transformation to Unix line enders for you seamlessly, but obviously some will not. Kick your text editor into Unix mode before editing a robots.txt file."

My question is, can I create and then edit my robots.txt simply using Notepad?

Thanks, BF

[ThomasB]

BF, what I usually do is, typing in the url of the robots.txt file in the browser adress bar and see if it looks nice. In case it doesn't (weird characters for example) change they way you upload and/or edit it as you described.

[wruppert]

You can use Notepad. You just have to be sure that the file is converted from DOS to Unix format when you upload it. Most FTP programs will do this automatically if they are in ASCII mode (not binary mode.)