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                  Squashing bugs and historical context lost

A few days ago I was going through the error log for the webserver and
noticing the rather large number of Internal Server Errors I was getting for
this site [1].

That was easy enough to solve: my software wasn't handing not-found pages
correctly; it was aware that the files weren't there, it just wasn't
bothering to send back the proper response to the webserver. I hadn't
bothered to actually write that part of the code.

Mark [2] had noticed. So had about a dozen robots [3] (who so far had made
about 700 failed requests this month).

I fixed the problem (although the error pages themselves are rather spartan)
and then spent some time going through the error log seeing what problems I
could fix. One typo on the template page probably accounted for half the
failed requests; the rest were typos in individual entries and missing files
from way back. For instance, an entry [4] over two years ago when I was still
playing around with formating entries. It pointed to some mockups I had done
that I had neglected to actually copy over when I went live. It's interesting
to look at those [5] mockups [6] and compare the format I'm using today [7]
(which just revealved another display bug that I'll need to get around
fixing. Sigh). I actually liked the rounded corners I used originally but I
used a hack to get them and (as the sidebar on those pages show) they don't
always work like I intended them to, which is why I dropped the concept.

I eventually solved the problem I was having with Lynx by using CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets) and because of the loss of historical context [8]
for that entry [9], the opening sentance now makes absolutely no sense
whatsoever. Of course this is the layout you are looking at right now.

[1] https://boston.conman.org/
[2] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/
[3] http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2000/02/12.1
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2000/02/12/bd2.html
[6] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2000/02/12/bd3.html
[7] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2000/03/01-02/21
[8] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/07/23.1
[9] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2000/02/12.1

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