Learned something new...

[techieMoe]

I've been doing some general housekeeping on my website this week, and part of that process was to fix my 404 page. As it stood at the time, an incorrect URL would direct you to the default 404 for my webservices provider, which was... sparse and not particularly helpful.

My webservice company offers a "Control Panel" with some web-based GUI tools to manage various aspects of your site, most of which (such as site statistics) are available only to those who host on Microsoft Windows. An attempt to access them from a Linux host will give you an ironic "You need to upgrade your account" message.

One of the utilities offered lets you set a new custom 404 page for your site. I tried this and no matter how many times I tried the utility, I always got the default 404. I decided to contact their live support, which has helped me through other issues in the past.

In the process of doing this I learned two things. The first: although my webservices company offers the option to host your pages on a Linux server, their customer support folks (not surprisingly) are completely untrained as to how to maintain them.

This was evident when I informed the support person of my problem, and he ran a few things on his end and came back with this gem of wisdom: "Your account is hosted on a Linux server. Our utility for 404 redirects does not work for this. You'll need to edit your own .htaccess file."

I asked him if he could walk me through that, which resulted in his basically telling me to STFW, and offering an example Google query. Color me unimpressed.

At least, I said to myself, I've learned that the magic file in question is called ".htaccess." This was the second thing I learned: that in order to redirect errant surfers to a specific page rather than the default 404, you need to edit a file called .htaccess in the top level of your domain.

Luckily, once I did go looking around, I found that it's a very simple text file with a few lines that you just drop into the root directory of your site and forget about. The site that helped me with this can be found here:

Custom 404 Error | customize your server error messages with .htaccess || HTMLSource ]

[flipjargendy]

That file is very interesting but I've never looked into how to make it work... thanks for the link.

I had a funny response from Comcast support. They gave me the same response as you but for a different question. I asked if I could get access to a shell account for my web space at Comcast. The web space is free.

This is how it went:

I asked if there I could have access to a shell account.
Support said,"What?"
I ask again,"Can I have access to a UNIX shell account for my web space?"
Support said,"What is that?" she pauses,"Google is a good source on this subject." she says implying that I should Google it. "I'm not getting any resources on that search result in our database. Sorry."
I say,"Well, then do I have FTP access so that I can upload files?"
Excited that she knew something he replied,"Yes, you can upload files with FTP. Is that all?"
"Yeah, that's all." I tell her.

Thanks again for nothing, Comcast.

[likwid]

lol, what is this 1995? Most ISP's don't offer shell accounts anymore.

[bigtomrodney]

I had to do this recently. Well a custom 404 that is. It's an in-joke at work, but given that the site is really only for us dudes at work I thought it appropriate.

Check it out -

http://kebabtray.com/some_broken_link_or_something

Mmmm. SVG graphics are nice. Good old Inkscape. Though I wish the browsers at works supported SVG so I didn't have to switch that to an exported PNG.

[Vergil83]

I had to do this recently. Well a custom 404 that is. It's an in-joke at work, but given that the site is really only for us dudes at work I thought it appropriate.

Check it out -

http://kebabtray.com/some_broken_link_or_something

Mmmm. SVG graphics are nice. Good old Inkscape. Though I wish the browsers at works supported SVG so I didn't have to switch that to an exported PNG.

That is great