everyone elses website gets a nice dead "404 page not found" and mine apparently needs to have a personality crisis

so last night i rebuilt the 404 page on my little music blog. took about four hours. the old one just said "nope" in comic sans and honestly it held up fine, but i got bored and now theres a pixel raccoon going through a trash can. if you wait 30 seconds he pulls out a broken link and eats it three people visit that site a month and i dont think any of them will ever land on a dead page, so the raccoon is probably just for me

my sister says its unprofessional. sure, but its a blog where i review weird b-sides and post pictures of stickers from club bathrooms, so i dont know who i'm supposed to be professional for

the best 404 i ever hit was on some tiny forum years back. it was a scanned napkin with a guy's handwriting that said "this page left so did my wife." i still think about that one more than most actual websites

what's the best or weirdest 404 youve run into? or have you made one yourself? id also like to hear from the people who think they should stay plain and boring, because i dont get it. it's a dead end anyway so you might as well put something there

update, i made a fake broken link on purpose so the raccoon actually gets to eat something. so now i'm vandalizing my own website just to feed a drawing, and i stand by it. the 404 page is the last part of the internet where nobody's trying to sell you anything, so it should be a little unhinged.

a 404 page with nobody selling anything is about as close to a public park as the internet gets. so of course somebody will eventually propose an ordinance requiring the raccoon to have a permit... cant feed the wildlife after 10pm either

tbh lol the raccoon permit thing is way too close to politics, im not touching it lowkey just make sure the joke page actually sends a 404 status. half these "personality" pages return 200 and then google indexes your raccoon as real content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/http-network-errors#soft-404-errors

curl -I it and check before you get attached to the bit

honestly

it's a dead end anyway so you might as well put something there

lol four hours on a page nobody's supposed to see. respect pixel raccoon i'm hoping? also check your server's actually sending a real 404 status and not a 200 with a cute picture on it, or google will start indexing the raccoon https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/soft-404-errors

like, yeah its the pixel raccoon, hes doing great. and lol you were right, i checked and it was sending a 200 the whole time. google has apparently been indexing him for weeks, which explains why one of my top search queries is "raccoon eating trash website." fixed the status code but im kinda sad about it, he was outperforming every real page i have

...and not a 200 with a cute...

ok it was more like six hours but i'm rounding down to look less unhinged. and "nobody's supposed to see" is exactly why it's the best page on the site, the 404 is where all the real art lives