On 404s and Coding

More pointless techno-geekery!

I hadn’t pulled a 404 report off my server in a while. A 404 report, say you? What’s that? Basically, it’s a report that tells me when people tried to access pages that don’t exist on the server. If it’s a full page, they get a message saying that the page has been exterminated and they need to get the hell of Skaro. (No, really, they do.) If it’s something like a graphic that’s loaded into a page, then the graphic just doesn’t show. And that’s called a 404.

Being the curious person that I am, I had to see—what kind of 404s were being hit?

A lot, it turned out.

Some of them are unavoidable, unfortunately. There are still links out there in the interwebs—none on this website, as best I can tell—that link to pages from the old Greymatter structure, and those pages just don’t exist in that form any longer.

But I noticed that I was seeing a lot of 404s coming from my stylesheet. Literally hundreds a day. At first glance, I thought it wasn’t loading for people. So I fired up my blog, and there it was, in all of its properly rendered glory. So, what was going on?

There was a bad graphics link in the stylesheet, that’s what. It’s fixed now, but I’ll pull the report again in a week or two and see if the number of 404s have dropped significantly (as they should).

With that problem fixed, I turned my attentions to writing up a print stylesheet for the blog. I’m a firm believer in print stylesheets—if I want to print out something, I want the content, not the nonsense like sidebars and blogrolls. It’s just good design, because what looks good on the screen just isn’t going to work right on the page. A sans-serif font on the screen, a serif font on the page. Blank lines between paragraphs on screen, proper paragraph indentation on the page.

Good design. 🙂

Bugs fixed, print accessibility. It’s fun working under the hood, y’know. 😉

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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