Tuesday, January 12, 2010

A Clever "Page Not Found" Message

Saw this this morning and thought it was clever. Definitely a classy way to deal with an issue that drives people away from a site (personally, I went back once I realized it wasn't a more generic 404 message).

Speaking of websites - how long has the sidebar on LMOTD been pushed past the side of the page? It looks pretty awful right now and I'm worried about what caused it. I have, once before, been disappointed to see a Blogger code issue mess with my HTML on the site, but I've never seen them break a layout in this manner before. I'm also a little suspicious of my less code-savvy co-blogger, who had added a few features on the sidebar (some of which I'm removing now for the sake of keeping the site looking clean, others I intend to keep - sidenote, I've now gone back to only allowing LMOTD co-bloggers to have author privileges and not admin privileges. You can't be too careful). I'm hoping to fix the bug tonight. EDIT 7:19 PM EST: Turns out that this bug does not cause anything unusual in Firefox. Users of Chrome, IE8, and Opera aren't seeing it correctly. RSS feed is unaffected.
Nevermind about the apparent LMOTD issue, turns out that it was caused by a large graphic that caused issues on some sizes of monitor. I'm generally pretty good at leaving things open so that they can wrap wherever they will (CSS obsessions and Google's Browser Size need not apply), but a graphic left with dimensions larger than a 15" monitor will always be a graphic larger than a 15" monitor. It's fixed now and I guess I'll have to be more careful next time (that post was one of several recently that was clearly a bit rushed). The surprising thing is that no angry comments or e-mails came in about this one - usually if I do something wrong, I get called on it pretty quickly. I like to joke that that's how I know I'm famous - you know people are reading if there's enough people out there that someone will jump on you within a few hours if you get something wrong.

1 comment:

Steven said...

403/404 whatever it is, it should be a generic, spiffy warning. Making a 404 so I dunno touchyfeelmegood is just an illrelevant post IMO.