Skip to main content

Making a better 404 page!

The old time 404 Pages are inherently dull. All they are supposed to tell you is: Sorry the file you are looking for is missing. Check spelling, or update Bookmarks. But with a little bit of creativity, you can actually make your 404 page Worthwhile!! Better yet, make it Ajaxy!!

The point is, the did already land on an non existing url! Reasons could be many; the page is in a new location now. or is completely deleted. But you dont want to really close the door on the visitor. Look at google's main site.. (It provides a search box on top. (isnt that what you were there for? in the first place). However, our users dont come to search. They ARRIVE on a link. My Idea is if its a missing spot, Ask the visitor to look around. Help him with a search page built into the 404 page.

One way is to point the 404 to a CGI or server script. Looking at the headers, you will have a pretty decent idea about where your visitor wanted to go. Then, instead of showing a boring message. Show him some search results. Yeah! Also Show the INFORMATIONAL message We dont want the user to look at a spam-like page eh? (:D). The other problem is 404 are executed even when some robotic web-spiders, or DoS attackers do their thing, burning down your bandwidth/resources. You just dont want to burn your server for stupid stupid robotic 404 traffic.

Now, Ajax gives you far more power in this situation. Use the Google Custom Search Engine. and Ajax Search API. I created a very simple one here. What it does is, looking at the url, it runs an ajax search to get related stuff from google. Now you want to HAVE this searrch done on YOUR site only. replace the value of siteToLookFor in the file to something like "*.yoursite.com". Thats it. The html file is droppable into any server. Once you put this file in your site send all 404s to this file, The only condition is that the 404 should NOT be a REDIRECT it should be a referrel (the url in the location barshould not change).

If you find better solutions, comment on! :) click here To see my 404 in action

image by Willem Velthoven
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Powered By

As it goes, We ought to give thanks to people who power us. This page will be updated, like the version page , to show all the tools, and people this site is Powered By! Ubuntu GIMP Firebug Blogger Google [AppEngine, Ajax and other Apis] AddtoAny Project Fondue jQuery
Read More >>

How to Make a Local (Offline) Repository in Ubuntu / Debian

If you are in a place where you dont have internet (or have a bad one) You want to download .deb packages and install them offline. Each deb file is packaged as a seperate unit but may contain dependencies (recursively). apt-get automagically solves all the dependencies and installs all that are necessary. Manually install deb files one by one resolving each dependency would be tedious. A better approach is to make your own local repository. Before you actually make a repo, You need *all* deb files. You dont practically have to mirror all of the packages from the internet, but enough to resolve all dependencies. Also, You have to make sure, you are getting debs of the correct architecture of your system (i386 etc) # 1. make a dir accessible (atleast by root) sudo mkdir /var/my-local-repo # 2. copy all the deb files to this directory. # 3. make the directory as a sudo dpkg-scanpackages /var/my-local-repo /dev/null > \ /var/my-local-repo/Packages # 4. add the local repo to sour...
Read More >>

Decorator for Memcache Get/Set in python

I have suggested some time back that you could modularize and stitch together fragments of js and css to spit out in one HTTP connection. That makes the page load faster. I also indicated that there ways to tune them by adding cache-control headers. On the server-side however, you could have a memcache layer on the stitching operation. This saves a lot of Resources (CPU) on your server. I will demonstrate this using a python script I use currently on my site to generate the combined js and css fragments. So My stitching method is like this @memize(region="jscss") def joinAndPut(files, ext): res = files.split("/") o = StringIO.StringIO() for f in res: writeFileTo(o, ext + "/" + f + "." + ext) #writes file out ret = o.getvalue() o.close() return ret; The method joinAndPut is * decorated * by memize. What this means is, all calls to joinAndPut are now wrapped (at runtime) with the logic in memize. All you wa...
Read More >>