Problems with a 404 Page and Not Understanding How they Work...

Report · Jan 03, 2011

I apologize in advance for this question because I understand so little about it I don't really know what to ask although, I think I found a solution. In a nutshell, I had a custom 404 page that worked OK (but it wasn't called 404.php it was notfound.php). Tidying up a site I discovered a dodgy link in the page so I went to that page in DW, fixed the link and uploaded it and... no difference.

I kept going round and round with this and every time I uploaded the page, nothing seemed to happen.What confused me a little more was that I was that I wasn't on my main PC but on a laptop. I fixed it by uploading a .htaccess file with one line in it pointing to the 404 and it worked. I think it was just this:

ErrorDocument 404 /errors/notfound.html

I say that I think that's what it was because when I got back to my PC, I can't even find the .htaccess file.

If anyone can tell me anything to reassure me that I haven't done anything awful, or to explain what might have happened, I'd be grateful.

Thanks

Martin

Report · Jan 03, 2011

Martin, I would start by checking your host control panel. You typically will have options there to maintain your 404 pages, including file naming. That may give you some clues as to what is going on.

Report · Jan 03, 2011

I think you have been so busy going round in circles that you're dizzy, and have written a post that also goes round in circles.

I've no idea what you're trying to say, but the situation with regards to 404 error pages is quite simple on an Apache server.

Often, the Apache configuration file, httpd.conf, defines the location of pages that should be displayed when an error occurs. You can also set your own error pages in an .htaccess file. The format is:

ErrorDocument error_num URL

So, for page not found and server errors:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

ErrorDocument 500 /server_error.html

The URL is normally relative to the site root, but you can also use a fully qualifiied URL beginning with http://.

Report · Jan 03, 2011

Thanks David and Bregent

I think you have been so busy going round in circles that you're dizzy, and have written a post that also goes round in circles.

It's unfortunate David, but this happens often!

Since Bregent's nudge I went back to the Host/control panel and remembered that I wasn't acutally allowed to set the 404 with .htaccess but had the option to cut and paste some coded into a panel. This site is hosted with 1-2-3-Reg and uses "MyPanel" (I think) and other sites I've worked on use cPanel which I find much easier to use. My problem was a duff link in the code I had pasted in there which was more or less identical to the page I had made and uploaded to my site conventionally.

Anyway, that's the way this host works and as I say, I'm used to cPanel. But what's weird now, is that I seemed to fix it with the .htaccess file, which disappeared after loading it!

More circles?

Martin

Happy New Year both et al.