This is freakin’ annoying……I have only 512MB of RAM in my work computer – a 2.6 Ghz machine, but only 512MB of RAM. I have to run 2 instances of Weblogic and 1 instance of JBoss at the same time – that means it takes like 5 minutes to compile a JSP!. AARRGGHH! Heck – I have a 1GB flash drive on my keychain but only 512 MB of memory in my work machine. Doesn’t make sense.
I spent a few minutes and made a custom 404 page for this site. Try hitting any non-existent page like http://myvogonpoetry.com/thispageisnthere and you can see it. Hit refresh to see a different version of it. If you are running Apache it’s really easy to create a custom 404 page – you pretty much just have to create a page and put it somewhere on your site then at the root of your site you put a .htaccess file that has this in it:
ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/errorpage
You can even do some fancy stuff with like PHP like show the user what URL they were trying to access. Here are some examples of error pages I did on my other sites (I really like the one I did for thebrokenkoystick.com):
http://thebrokenjoystick.com/thispageisnthere
http://pipasoft.com/thispageisnthere
I think I am going to create a new category of posts called webware. These will be posts about websites that are essentially software, except the software is on the web. Sites like FeedDigest, GMail, BackPack, Mailinator, and AudioScrobbler would count as webware. In fact, I am going to create a Wikipedia page for webware right now – maybe this will start a trend of people using this as a word.
Here’s a handy site for quickly making text images to use on your site. I have used them to make menus and a logo on my arcade site and I used it recently to make menu buttons on my software site. Come to think of it, I need to post a link-back to Acme on those sites.
Check this out – it’s called Drivey – it’s a small driving sim/game that is tiny (325 kb). It’s got a really cool feel to it – it harkemns back to the old driving games like Night Driver and Hard Drivin’. Very cool. You don’t even have to install the game – it just runs from the single executable.