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 title: Four, Oh, Four...
 date: 2024-01-13 14:50:00
 soundtrack: "You & Me = Forever" by Zak Vortex
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I did it.

I finally broke down and added the _tiniest_ bit of JavaScript to
my site. I know, I'm awful, but hear me out.

I've been thinking about retro computing a lot again, especially as
it pertains to The Internet (capital "T," capital "I," baby), and
I've been wanting to add a little more personality (and maybe an
easter egg or two) to things.

One thing that I _haven't_ yet set up for myself is a kickass 404
page—or... you know... a 404 page at all. I think I designed a
simple one a million moons ago, but I never actually configured my
web server to serve it up.

But I'm nothing if not an expert procrastinator, so I finally
jumped into my Caddyfile [0], pointed all its 404 responses to my
404 page, and... was supremely disappointed.

The page I had was _boring_.

So I dug into the depths of my brainpan and remembered an old
glitch effect I used half-a-dozen years ago that felt right at home
with my preferred aesthetic. Unfortunately, this meant importing
one small JavaScript file and adding a single line of code to
activate it.

But, in the interest of keeping things tidy, it's only loaded on my
error page (alongside a fun deconstruction of a rotary phone,
courtesy of our friends at OpenAI), and is all sorts of fun to look
at.

If you're interested, feel free to head directly to /404.html [1],
or just mash your keyboard a bit to get to an actual 404 error on
the flower.codes domain.

Oh, and in case you were wondering how old browsers deal with this?
The answer is twofold: not well, and it doesn't really matter.

While the actual `404.html` page can be loaded in older browsers,
most of them ignore the `<script>` tags (except for our friend
Internet Explorer, which fails hard, but I fixed that with
conditional comments [2]), but more importantly, nearly every
historical browser shows _their own error page_ when a 404 response
is encountered; so investing any real effort into backwards
compatibility is a moot point.

---
[0]: https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile
[1]: http://flower.codes/404.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_comment
---

>> This is post 022 of #100DaysToOffload

EOF