Meryl's Notes Blog
Things wordy, geeky, and webby404 Work Around
Friday, September 2nd, 2005 at 8:01 AM | 3 commentsFirst time I’ve seen a 404 requesting details such as the link you were looking for, what content was expected, and where the link came from. The drawback is the visitor may not take the time to fill it out, but I did and I am sure others do. I believe this is a win-win tool as it helps the site fix problem links and help other visitors who might arrive at the same link later (it could be fixed by then).
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3 comments
What gets me is that the server already has this information, why don’t/can’t they use it?
I gotta figure that in a lot of cases people don’t have access to the needed tools, but I’m betting that a lot of people do - and don’t know how to use them.
On my previous site my custom ErrorDocument referenced this information to redirect if possible, and even in cases where there was no redirect available, I was still able to look at my request logs and see what was going on.
This is off topic, but is there a reason you are not doing full text posts in your feed?
Ben is right, the server already has the info. I used to run a script that when a user got a 404 it would automatically email me the info and I would put a redirect in place if needed. But that only worked until I started seeing people putting in totally invalid URLs like mydomain.com/http://www.cnn.com/ etc.
Anyway, just a thought.
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