I stumbled upon a great article by Dean Frickey, entitled A More Useful 404, which discusses the need for blogs (and other pages) to have a more elaborated 404 page. I couldn’t agree more with the fact that most website out there offer very slim possibilities to their users to find what they were looking for on your site. I immediately thought that it would be a great little plugin to add to the ever increasing collection of wordpress plugins out there (about 3758 as I write this). To my surprise, and delight, someone had already written a plugin for it, creatively called Useful 404 (Also found on wordpress’s download site). I was happy to find that this plugin works great on wordpress 2.7, which is fabulous by the way.
Unfortunately, I may have to tweak the plugin a little bit since it is missing what is, in my opinion, the most important feature of a customized 404 page, which is to offer the user a list of possible candidates that actually exist on your site. This feature is apparently already available in another 404 plugin called Smart 404 (Also on wordpress’s download site), but this one doesn’t seem to function on Wordpress 2.7 yet. Anyways, I highly recommend the plugin Useful 404 for now. Simple to install and does the job very nicely for now. Any other 404 plugins out there?
Askimet is amazing
I’ve been bombarded by spam comments on my website lately. About 150 a day I’d say. I got tired and decided to do something about it. I knew that there was a tool out there that did the work for me. It took me a minute to find it using my favourite search engine and installed it. The spam comment problem was so bad that while I installed it, I got about four or five spam comments in my mailbox… Well, today Askimet stopped 160 spam comments… I can’t believe it. This is so amazing, I’m loving it.
I’ll write more very soon. I am working on a personal project for the wedding and it’s been taking a LOT of my time. Anyways. Right now, I need to crash.