No more missing files

Every change to a structure of the website brings one of two things – either an increase in the number of “Not Found” pages also known as 404, or an increase in the mess with redirection files, which move visitors from old locations to new ones. Every time there is a choice to be made in favour of one or the other.

After a recent reorganization of photo albums I’ve noticed an increase in the 404s in the logs. It gave me the opprotunity to think about the issue once again, and I decided to change the configuration of my web server, which runs on Apache, to redirect from any missing file to the root of the site. All had to do add this line:

ErrorDocument 404 /

to the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file and restart the daemon.

This step, of course, doesn’t guarantee that those who seek for something specific will find it, but it sure does improve the chances.

So there’ll be no more 404s on this server! Enjoy browsing. :)