Error 404 !

The page you are looking for resigned and now works for a competitor,
You can click here to go back to the previous page

Ok actually this page is probably due to one of the following reasons.

  • We are in the process of re-constructing BuildGuide.NET, This page could be somewhere else now, Try navigating to the new location by using the links above
  • You have come to this page through a broken or outdated link.
  • If you have typed in this file's name, Make sure that you have typed it in correctly and in the correct case (filenames are case sensitive) that is a capital letter is different from a small letter in a word.
  • The page is temporarily unavailable or down for maintenance.
  • The page may have been moved or removed

 

This is an 404 Error page, Want to know what Error 404 means, Forget about navigating back now and read on.

What does error 404 mean?
where do status codes come from ?
Why do i see this customized error page ?
How do i make custom error pages for my website ?

What does 404 mean?

Every Error you encounter on the internet has an error code, For example you have just encountered an 404 error that means the page you have requested can not be found in the location you specified.

Every time you ask your browser for a page on the internet, it requests it from a server (you are the client), That server looks for the page you requested and sends it to you so you can look at it (while looking you may read or just look or even absent mindedly pretend to be looking or reading)

When the server does not find the page you are looking for, it reports the problem back to you saying 404, and you should know what 404 means. Obviously it means, the page you have requested can not be found, everybody knows that.

Well if you didn't already know that, read on, there are many more error codes those internet designers (W3C) assumed you know

For example codes that start with a 4 are client errors (misspelled URL, followed a broken link, etc...), most common of them all is 404 (The one that showed you this unrelated page while you were looking for something from planet earth), If you have been seeing other 4XX codes, you should either check your machine or change your ISP (No you don't have the choice you have to see which one is causing the problem)
The 0 in the middle stands for Syntax Error, and the four at the end is the specific arbitrarily chosen number, for example 400 is bad request and  401 is  Unauthorized access.

So this is an error code, How come computers always tell you how stupid you are, how come it always says You have made an error, why does it never say Good Job or Excellent (A real life example: Why does my computer say Bad File name, why does it never say Excellent or great filename)

Well, the people who made the internet (HTTP) did, An excellent file location actually returns returns the code 200, unfortunately the people who made your browser forgot all about it, once the server says 200 (excellent file name) your browser gets too excited about the page that it starts showing it to you immediately and forgets to tell you that you have done a good job writing in the name or following a Great Valid hyperlink.

Do i the client always commit those sins, cant the server be wrong once ?

Surely, actually 20% of the time it admits it, the other 80% it gives you the 404 error pointing the figure at you, while in reality you can blame him for not having a file named ("letmepeakplease.htmlx"), Sometimes nicer servers admit there mistake by giving you an error code that starts with a 5 ! five hundred something means i am sorry but an error has occurred at my side, would you please come back later ? and sometimes just refreshing your page solves such a problem.

So where do status codes come from?

Ok, let me start by the web (HTTP) was created by some cool guy (Berners-Lee) And made the codes based on those codes from FTP (Yes FTP is older than the web).

There is a myth about 404 that it was his office number, Well, It is not true, The Office 404 people are referring 2 does not exist, Berners-Lee himself said so.

Why do i see this customized  page and not the usual Error 404 page ?

Apache gives you the ability to customize all error pages by specifying an error page location in a file called .htaccess, in out htaccess file

How do i create custom error pages like this one?

It is simple, You need to have a text file with the name .htaccess (some people reported that a .htaccess can not be created under windows if that is the case name it anything and rename it to .htaccess)

in that page  you need only one line to make a custom error 404 page, and another similar line for every other error, the line should read exactly

ErrorDocument 404 /errors/er404.php

where errors is the directory and er404.php is the file to be displayed when error encountered, You should note that one of the most common mistakes doing this is placing the error file in a directory called (error) this will not work for a simple reason, apache already uses a directory called error, so it will try to find your file there, we use the directory errors as an alternative.

You can do much more with apache like redirecting from page to page and other things (by sending header files to the browser), that we will go through soon on the info2device.com website or on buildguide.net

BuildGuide.NET is part of the INFO2DEVICE Network
Sister Websites: Lyrics And Songs - Web Hosting Provider