404 pages

localhost.com.au

I wondered why going to http://localhost would often take me to a site in Australia. Apparently its due to Bug 184433 – Internet Keywords triggered by “connection refused” errors (hostname not running server on requested port). Really looking forward for this one to be fixed! I’m still not sure why it ends up there as I don’t think I had keywords configured and I was running a server on localhost (although not necessarily on port 80) Thanks to Neil’s whats new in Firebird post for the link that led me to this.

Custom 404 page edited.

Its taken me all weekend, but I have now edited my 404 page. I’m not that slow a coder – the time has included a very slow download and reinstallation of Foxserv after I broke my apache’s httpd.conf file when fiddling with it to get a custom 404 page on the laptop installation that I am testing with.
Now my 404 page does not send me a notification email if someone is using a hacking script to scan for formmail and ends up at my 404 page. Its been quite a good exercise in coding as I’ve used server variables to obtain the requested web page and the refererring page, Regular expressions to check that its not some variant of formmail and a couple of if statements to do the logic. This is the best way to learn php with a (small) project to do something useful on the website.