This is a nice tip for people having problems with custom 404 pages in Internet Explorer. If you don’t know what a 404 error is, then let me explain in the shortest form possible:

It’s what your browser gets when it can’t find the page you requested.

There, a very low-tech explanation that goes straight to the point. If you want a “real” explanation, I suggest www.plinko.net.
Take a look around - they have everything you need to know about 404, and then some.

When I was making my very own custom 404 page for this blog, which should be a reasonably easy task, I stumbled upon a really weird problem. No matter how much I tried, I could not see the page in Internet Explorer. It was working fine in Firefox, but IE kept showing me its own standard “Page not found”. I went googling on the problem and it became clear that this is a known issue. IE is a little bit too smart for its own good – if you dig through the options, you’ll find a little gem named “Show friendly HTTP error messages”. If this is enabled, then IE can choose to ignore the content of error pages and show its own version of them. And, this option is enabled by default (of course…).

A good workaround is to prevent your browser from knowing that your page is actually a 404 page, and you can do that by forcing the return of a code 200.
How exactly you do that? Well depends on which technology you are using for generating the pages. Basically, you must be able to control the HTTP headers being returned. In the case of PHP (which I use in this case), I could solve my problem by adding this block of code:

<?php
  header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
  header("Status: 200 OK");
?>

The two different styles of declarations are just to ensure that will work, regardless of what version of PHP is being used. Note that this must absolutely be the first thing on the page!
You can check my 404 page. If I did my job right, you should see it, even in IE.

Categories: Tips 4 Geeks
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After some tweaking of the vSlider theme for Gallery2, Cristina and I started uploading pictures… lot’s of them! We started by photos of our travels. We are still in the process of organizing them, but you can check the progress so far in the Photos section. Enjoy…

Categories: Maintenance, Photoholics
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Finally… this took a LOT longer than I thought. When I decided to make a new theme for Gallery2 to make it seamless integrated with WordPress, I knew that it would take some time, but this baby took ages! Ok, it’s my fault, because I kept changing the layout and wanting to add more “cool” things - “I just add a great idea!! What if I added a transparent side menu that slides over the contents? These way, I don’t use up any space of the pictures… Uh, uh, and, what if…”. Yep, the hours just pilled up doing crazy stuff.
Anyway, it’s finally working now as I wanted – I still have a few issues to solve/improve, but these will be fixed in time. Check it out on the link of the top bar.
Now the process of uploading photos begins…

Tags: Gallery, photos, WordPress
Categories: Maintenance
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No real updates, since I’m still working on the Gallery theme.
But today I was listening to “Be Human” by Yoko Kanno (which is IMHO one of the greatest composers alive), and I decided to post the lyrics. The music is from Ghost in Shell - Stand Alone Complex.
The simple things of life that a machine dreams of… and we just take all of this stuff for granted.


Show me more… »

Tags: Anime, Human, Life, Music
Categories: Maintenance, Be Human
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Ok, progress on the site is going a bit slow, but steady. I officially named my theme vSlider! It’s practically finished, but it has been put on hold, mainly because I’m now working on setting up Gallery2. Of course, I want to have everything customized and integrated, so I’m also making a theme for G2 that matches the vSlider look and feel, and blend them together with the fantastic WPG2. If I’m successful (and I will be!), I’ll have a full WordPress + Gallery2 custom theme.

Categories: Maintenance
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