The dreaded 404 error is what a user will get when they visit a link on your site that no longer exists. Thankfully WordPress catches the 404 and gives a slightly nicer error than the generic one that is generated by the web server. It’s still not a great page to see and I know there’s ways (using plugins) to make it even more friendly.

I had a quick look when I got home from work at anything that might help me solve the problem.

Very quickly, knowing that other people would have had the same thought, I found the 404 Notifier Plugin for WordPress from the always excellent Alex King. There was a warning when I installed it that it had only been tested to WordPress V2.5, but hey, I like to live dangerously!

It’s a simple plugin that gives two options for notification:

• An email to a specified email address with details of each 404 error.
• A custom RSS feed with the details.

I thought it would be better to use the email option initially. Oh how wrong I was!

Within 10 minutes of activating the plugin I had 30 emails from the system with details. Some of the relate to a favicon but all the rest refer to an image that I had uploaded back in March of 2007. I removed the image because leechers were sucking all my bandwidth hotlinking the image.

If those are the only 404 errors then I am not too worried. I replaced the image on photobucket and re-linked it in the original post.

I have one other for the RSS feed for the “miniblog”, which is now Mini Mini Mini. I don’t know where to start solving that one as “miniblog” doesn’t exist and I have no referrer information.

What I would really like to do is find a way to stop the referrer (British Blogs) in the first place. I might contact BB to see if they can help and I will continue my efforts to solve the problem but any ideas people have would be great!

I am not a fan of Blogger although I believe that it works for those that are using it. I am WordPress All The Way™ and love it.

Now, many cachers will tell you, it’s not about the numbers. If that was true then why do they log their finds on the geocaching.com website? Yes, ok, to share the story of the hunt/find/DNF or whatever. But! Most cachers will be able to tell you their find count without referring to the website. I am included in that!

If we didn’t like boasting about how many caches we have found then applications like the fantastic Cachestats[3. Other statistics applications are available!]. If you look at my Geocaching page then you will see the output from Cachestats that you can put in your geocaching.com profile. These stats that I display aren’t all that are available from the application, just the ones I feel are most relevant to me.

One of the problems that I had with trying to get the Cachestats HTML to display properly on the Geocaching page is that the output from Cachestats is designed to sit within your caching profile on the GC website. This works great on geocaching.com but causes all sorts of problems on other websites (like this very blog!).

To solve the problem is actually very very simple and nothing to do with mucking about with the Cachestats HTML Export.

Making the assumption that you’re using a self-hosted WordPress blog, and not WordPress.com[4. They don't allow the user to install plugins] then all you need to do is install the Raw-HTML Plugin by Janis Elsts.

This puts a few options into the new post window on the right hand side (see the image, left) called Raw HTML.

When you are creating whatever post or page (as in this case) you can just tick the appropriate boxes (I have all of them ticked for the page) and then paste in the HTML export from Cachestats. In the case of my Geocaching page I have a little bit of introductory text before the stats. I have had to use HTML characters for paragraphs to get the paras to display nicely.

Whenever you grab your MyFinds GPX file from Geocaching.com and import to Cachestats you can then update the WordPress page by highlighting everything below your introduction (if you have one) and just paste in the new HTML Export from Cachestats.

Please let me know if this helps or if you use a different method to display your Geocaching statistics on your WordPress or Blogger blog.

That’s exactly what I’ve done for the new theme on here. It’s not too bad, certainly quicker loading than the Vista type effort I had on here previously. Hopefully, Paul, you’ll find this a little quicker. :)

Of course, I can do that with plugins too!

I have also turned off the daily digest of Twitter posts. It was getting on my nerves as it would regularly post the same digest 6 or seven times. As Andy C also pointed out in comments (thanks Andy!):

If I wanted to follow you on Twitter, I would.

So they’re history too. They’ll stay in the sidebar for the moment but they may disappear soon to…