Author Archives: Brian

Custom 404 pages

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

Windows XP Alt-Tab replacement (powertoys)

Here is another app I install almost immediately on a new XP install – it’s an Alt-Tab replacement from Microsoft. Normally you see icons representing your running applications, but with this installed, when you Alt-Tab, it shows the icon plus it shows you a small “screenshot” of the running app. Very cool and very handy.

Alt-Tab replacement homepage

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