Tag Archives: Error

Are you a web geek? Can a 404 error page excite you?

404 error signIf the former is true, it proves the latter. I’ll confess “yes” to both.

Today at work I was doing some miscellaneous web-related research (aimless surfing? no, no, never), and I came across a page of creative 404 error pages that inspired me to finally do something interesting with my own 404 error message.

Having lived in Atlanta (area code 404), I initially set out to do something that played off that. (I know, very original. I just wanted to make sure not to settle for “Tha 404.”) But it wasn’t long before my roadgeek tendencies kicked in and I thought of something even better.

Here’s my 404 page. (The image at right is a spoiler, of course.)

The sign image is (mostly) my own creation in Photoshop: I swiped the shield images for I-16 and Georgia 404 as SVGs from their respective Wikipedia pages, and the font is courtesy of another roadgeek. Whenever I start to question myself, I am reassured that there are others out there even sicker than I am.

Incidentally, there really is a Georgia 404, although the only place you’ll see a sign for it is on a small spur route near Savannah. Georgia’s Department of Transportation has a funny little quirk in that it has given all freeway-grade roads a state highway designation in the 400 range. (I suppose the “4” indicates 4 or more lanes.) As far as I know (and as this PDF from the GDOT website seems to confirm), there’s only one road in the system for which this is the main designation, however: Georgia 400, which is a main commuter artery running north (well, northish) from Buckhead out to the north-central suburbs and beyond into Deliverance country, since both I-75 and I-85 veer off diagonally out of the city (into the northwest and northeast suburbs and beyond into Deliverance country).

All of the other freeways in the state have a “4xx” designation too, but there are generally no signs indicating such, because they all also have a familiar designation, usually an Interstate number.

As it happens, Georgia 404 is better known as I-16 (hence the double shields on my sign image), which, interestingly enough, is not really “interstate” even though it’s an “Interstate”; it starts in Macon and ends in Savannah.

Catalog of Annoying Grammatical and Spelling Errors

Originally posted July 12, 2006

First off, let me acknowledge that my English ain’t perfect. (Get it?) That said, it’s pretty damn good. And when I make grammatical errors, it’s usually on purpose and I’m aware that I’m using something incorrectly. In those cases, I’m only doing it because I don’t really care and it’s not something I’d label as an egregious mistake. (I don’t make spelling errors, period! Well, OK… maybe once.) I will also acknowledge that English is not a fixed language, and that the rules of its use are arbitrary and subject to permutation. (And, of course, I’m sure anyone outside the U.S. who’s reading this will find the title itself to be unacceptable. Too bad! I’m an American! I get to be an arrogant jerk at least once in a while!)

With all of those qualifiers and disclaimers out of the way, let’s get down to business. There’s a difference between novel usage (and I’ll even let 1337 pass in that context) and just plain boneheaded errors though, and the latter is what I’m dealing with here. This page will be updated periodically as I encounter (or remember) errors of speech or (more commonly) writing that I simply find intolerable. (Split infinitives and dangling participles are OK. And so is beginning a sentence with a conjunction.)

These errors fall into three distinct categories: spelling, word usage and grammar. (We’ll skip the matter of whether to use a comma before “and” in a list, as I’m at a point of transition on this matter personally.) OK, maybe they’re not really so distinct. But that’s how I’m slicin’ ’em up anyway.

Spelling

I will not bother to offer the correct spellings of these words. Look ’em up!

  • comming
  • definately

Word Usage

This is a bit of a nebulous category, as sometimes it’s hard to tell whether what you’re dealing with is a spelling error or a grammatical error. In fact it’s a mixture of both, because often it involves spelling a word incorrectly, but in a way that happens to be another legitimate word; it’s just one that’s incorrect for the context.

Apostrophes in plurals
Granted, I am a super-genius, but I got this rule back when I first learned it in elementary school. Is it really that hard to tell the difference between a plural and a possessive? Apparently so. Of course, we also have the confounding situation of “its”/”it’s,” where the posessive does not contain an apostrophe. But then again, the one with the apostrophe is a contraction, not a plural.
“Alot” vs. “a lot”
Have too many things to count? That sounds like “a lot” to me. You’d better “alot” plenty of time for the task.
“Everyday” vs. “every day”
This is an “everyday” mistake. In fact, I encounter it almost “every day.” Since that one’s still a bit opaque, I’ll suspend the witticisms. “Everyday” is an adjective. You can’t do something “everyday,” unless “everyday” is describing the something and not when you’re doing it.
“Formally” vs. “formerly”
Both are legitimate and useful words. However, despite similar (or, depending on your accent, identical) pronunciation, they mean two completely different things. Yet I am amazed at how often I see “formally” used in cases where the intended meaning is clearly “formerly.” I have yet to see the reverse mistake.
“Of” in place of “have”
I know you generally don’t really get into dissecting parts of speech until junior high school, long after most Americans have completely tuned out, but just think for a minute. “Have” is a verb. “Of” is a preposition. You can “think of” something, but you can’t “must of” or “could of” something!
“To” instead of “too”
*Sigh* Do we really even need to get into this? I’ll admit this is an easy one to slip into, as I often do it myself if I’m not paying enough attention. (Therefore, if even I am susceptible to the error, it must be more excusable.) Just remember, there are “too” many o’s in “too.” (Yes, there also happen to be “two” o’s in “too” whereas there is only one in “two.” But… ah, forget it.)

Grammar

I don’t have any for this section yet, but I’m sure I’ll think of some any minute now…

More to come! Be sure to use the comment form to suggest any I’ve forgotten!

Forget what I said before; we have a winner!

It’s a given that anything I post here is going to be brain-deflatingly stupid. But this one goes beyond even what I would have expected of Microsoft. Fortunately, thanks to a highly effective Google search, I was able to solve the problem in minutes.

The problem was this: For a site I’m working on, we are manipulating the 404 error feature to allow users to set up customized URLs. If the URL entered doesn’t match a real page, it gets fed into this 404 error script, which looks up the path in a database and redirects the user to their customized page. A bit of a hack, but it’s pretty slick.

As usual, I am developing the site using Firefox as my test browser. But… UH-OH! Surprise! When giving a demo of this feature today using Internet Explorer, we discovered it didn’t work! Internet Explorer was not returning the server’s 404 error page, instead using its own internal version (which we’ve all seen and most generally ignore).

Drat! What to do? Well, as it turns out (thanks to the aforementioned Google search), the problem is quite simple. To quote the unbelievable but, as I verified, 100% accurate description I found on this page:

Internet Explorer has a lightly-documented “feature” that stops it from serving any custom 404 error page that is less than 512 bytes long. Your visitors will instead be sent to IE’s own 404 page, which is generic and suggests they use an MSN search to “look for information on the Internet.” That’s one way to lose visitors! Make sure your custom 404 error page is over this limit — about 10 full lines of text and HTML should be enough.

Yep, that’s it. I did my best Bart Simpson-at-the-blackboard impersonation, filling my 404.html file with a large comment block wherein I repeated (about 130 times, for good measure) the phrase “This block exists solely to force Internet Explorer to load this page.”

Sure enough, it worked. D’oh!

Thinking a bit more about this, I at least think I understand why Microsoft chose to do this. “If the server’s default 404 error page is so short,” I imagine them musing, “then it probably doesn’t offer users much helpful information. And since our wonderful web browser is much more important to our users than the web pages themselves, let’s just butt in and do things our way. (Is there really any other way anyway?)”