Midwest Geek

While on the way home from dinner one night.

Monk: What the hell won’t he do?

Jason: What do you mean?

Monk: The song is “I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that”, what is it that he won’t do?

Jason: That’s unknown. I’ve tried looking it up and it’s a guess as to what “it” actually is.

Monk: It’s rather dumb anyway, because how can you say that you would do anything, but then state you won’t do that one thing.

Jason: I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Meat Loaf.

Monk: Well I can’t do that, but what’s his last name?

Jason: Loaf, his name is “Meat” “Loaf”

Monk: Neither his song or his name make much sense.

Jason: It’s just a song.

Monk: So what do you think “it” is?

Jason: That’s easy…a Devil’s threesome.

Monk: (confused) What’s a Devil’s threesome?

Jason: One chick, two dudes.

Monk: And one dude, two chicks would be a Heavenly threesome?

Jaosn: Yep.

Monk: You are so male.

Jason: I know Sweetness, I know.

Since I get about 150 visitors a day from Area 404, I’m going to show you how to error properly.

For those who don’t know what a 404 error is, it’s really simple. When you go to a webpage that isn’t there and see the famous, “This page cannot be displayed”, that is a 404 error. If you still don’t get it, for the love of all things good and holy, read what Wikipedia has to say about them.

Anyway, this will cover how to create them for Apache on a Linux system. There are a few things you will need and they are all easy if you already of your own website, blog, or whatever.

You will need:

1. 1. FTP (or SSH) access to your site.
2. 2. Something to create a couple of web pages with.
3. 3. Creativity.

We are going to have to work this list from the bottom up, since I am way too lazy to go back and edit what I just typed. Bust out the creativity and create yourself single webpage that works; it could contain anything from simple black text to a brilliantly created flash file and just name it 404.html.

I’ll wait while you finish that….

All done…great. I am so patient, you’re rather lucky to have me.

Now that you are done flowing your creative juices, you need to get those files on your web server. They can really go anywhere as we are going to create a file that links to them. Since you have either FTP or SSH access, go ahead and get the files on your web server.

Pretty easy so far right? Well it just as easy from here on out.

If you are on Windows, open up notepad. Linux users use whatever text editor you like and you Mac people…uh, open something very texty.

Now that we have all done that and so that I don’t have to type out three different sets of instructions, you need to save a file to your desktop call “1.htaccess” (without the quotes). The file cannot be “1.htaccess.txt” or “1.htaccess.doc” or anything like that. Now that you have that created open it up and place this one simple line in it.

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

You will want the /404.html to be the path to your actually 404.html. So if you placed your 404 files in /error/404.html, make sure that is displayed properly in the file and save it.

Now, before you upload this, make sure you don’t already have a file called “.htaccess” on your web server. If you do and you overwrite it with this rather blank “.htaccess” file it could break your website. If you do have such a file, just copy the line into it anywhere and you should be off and running.

If you don’t have such a file, go ahead and upload this one. Once you have it on your web server, change the name of the file from “1.htaccess” to “.htaccess”.

Test it by going to http://www.yoursite.com/blahblahblah and you should see the webpage you created. If you didn’t, double check that you are on a Linux server and that you have followed all the steps above.

Done.

To see why I get 150 people are showing up to see how I error, just go to http://www.midwestgeek.net/thispageisnotreal