What To Do With Your 404 Page
January 25th, 2007 by Richard CockrumSynchronicity works. I frequent Open Comment Night at Liz Strauss’ Successful Blog on Tuesday nights. While we talk, we often visit the blogs of participants to see who we’re talking with. This past Tuesday, Brandon Wood was there. While I was at Brandon’s blog I saw a post on Building a better 404 page for Wordpress.In the post Brandon talked about some code that Doug Karr had written to actually do something useful with the 404 page on a Wordpress blog.
I thought, “I use Wordpress. Useful is good.“, so I went over to Doug’s post, Wordpress 404: Page Not Found? Try these links…
One of the common pieces of advice for a blog is to make your 404 page (you know, the one that pops up when a post can’t be found on your blog) useful. Most of us ignore this piece of advice and just leave it the way it came out of the box with our theme. Some of us say “Whoops! Sorry, I lost what you were looking for.” Doug Karr actually took the advice to heart and wrote a script that will list related posts on your blog if the post that was being looked for isn’t found. Pop on over, download the code, and copy it into your 404 page. Even 404 will earn its keep now!
Thanks for the pointer, Brandon! And thank you for the code, Doug!
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January 25th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Hey, thanks for the link Rick. I’m glad you found my post helpful!
January 25th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
It was very helpful, Brandon. I can program in C++, but know little about PHP. I’ve been wanting to do something with my 404 page for a long time. This pointer to Doug’s post was just the ticket.
January 28th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Hey Rick — thanks for writing about that. I put it into use straightaway! I also have a little add-on that I’ve used for a couple of years now that emails me with details when someone hits a 404. It’s useful for catching bad links and also to set up redirects for old page links that may be floating around in the netosphere.
January 28th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Hi Steve,
I’m glad it’s something you could use. I’m glad it’s something Doug came up with and Brandon led me to.
I would like to hear some more about how you do the redirect when someone hits an old page link. Like I said in my comment to Brandon, I can do desktop programming, but can barely hack my way around web programming. If you could do a post about it,or comment on it, or send me an email, I would really appreciate it.
January 29th, 2007 at 3:26 am
I always think it’s awesome when someone takes the time to actually do things that most other people COMPLETELY leave static. I’m sure this is helpful to a lot of Wordpress users!
January 29th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Hi Michael,
Thanks for stopping in. Most of us don’t really know what constructive thing to do with our 404 page, or if we know what we want to do, don’t know how to do it. Doug’s code give us the opportunity. It’s a great idea for a Wordpress site.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:19 am
[…] Using WordPress, Rick Cockrum takes another approach. He sites Brandon Wood’s approach from Building a Better 404 Page for WordPress. Brandon added automatic search results to his 404 page, using the keywords from the broken URL. With a small script from Doug Karr, Brandon was off and running. […]