Yesterday, I spent some time configuring permalinks in WordPress and setting up a custom 404 error page. The GoDaddy default 404 page is lame. I also wanted to add some JavaScript that Google provides to make some suggestions and ultimately provide a Google search of the site when the page you are looking for can not be found.

First, Google provided me with this code block to include in my custom 404.

<script type="text/javascript">
var GOOG_FIXURL_LANG = 'en';
var GOOG_FIXURL_SITE = 'http://www.flbelt.com/';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://linkhelp.clients.google.com/tbproxy/lh/wm/fixurl.js"></script>

I was able to edit my theme 404.php file using WordPress Admin -> Appearance -> Editor, and selecting 404.php on the right. I added the JavaScript from Google and the php snippet below at the top to make the pages more search engine friendly (so they would return the proper 404 status code, rather than 200 OK when serving up the page)

<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
header("Status: 404 Not Found");
get_header(); ?>

Now came the tricky part, when I would go to the GoDaddy control panel choose 404 Error Behavior, select custom and input /index.php?error=404 or /?error=404 as required by WordPress, GoDaddy would return an error and say that my custom page could not contain a question mark!

After searching around a bit, I decided to try to add the error page to .htaccess since GoDaddy would not support the option I was looking for. So I created a .htaccess in the root of my website with the following.

ErrorDocument 404 /?error=404

But in spite of the information in the .htaccess GoDaddy still seemed to redirect to the old error page. Now I was stumped and turned to Google.

There I found this blog entry showed the way to disable GoDaddy’s 404 handling and allow requests to pass to your .htaccess was to select the “Use home page” option (not documented on GoDaddy’s help portal btw).

Then I found this blog entry which pointed out the GoDaddy’s servers only refresh the .htaccess every so often. Their advice, just wait a little bit (was about 15 minutes for me) after you update/add an .htaccess before testing.

Finally it was working! After all that I was even able to turn on more descriptive permalinks in WordPress (which rely on .htaccess working properly also) and that is working now too!

You can use this link to see our custom 404 page. Took a little more time than I had wanted, but im happy with the end result!

The last week or two I have been working on switching a number of our tech services.  This was primarily an exercise in cost reduction, but there have been some nice functional pickups, but those have been accompanied by minor losses also.

Email
We have been hosting our own email server (Microsoft Exchange) for a number of years.  The initial draw to Exchange was the ability to use it for email, contacts, and calendaring as well as its integration to our then Windows Mobile smart phones.  The smart phones have since been replaced with phones that do not sync directly with Exchange. I have been looking around (over the last 6 months or so) for a good hosted email service.  Since we are running Exchange 2003, I knew an upgrade to 2007 or a full hosted replacement was likely going to be something we needed to do in the next 6-12 months. I was never able to find something I thought was a good functional replacement at a reasonable (less than $100/year) cost.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled up Google Apps.  It offers email with a great web client to a custom domain name (like flbelt.com), calendaring, and contacts.  It also will allow you to connect via IMAP or POP3 from you favorite mail client (like Outlook), but the best part was the price… its free for family use! It also offers a functional replacement for email aliases (I like to register on sites with an alias instead of my real email address I use for friends and family) and groups or distribution lists that allow us to set up special email addresses that Loretta and I can share.

After a couple week evaluation with one of our test domains, we decided to make the switch.  We are now happily using email hosted by Google, and so far its working out great!

Domain Registrar
We have been hosting our Internet DNS and using the Domain Registrar services at No-IP.com for about 5 years.  Overall we have been happy with the service, and their Backup MX service came in very handy when we were hosting our own email server and had occasional unexpected or extended outages.

Since we no longer needed the backup MX services, I began looking around for a lower cost registrar.  What I found is that we could save a fair amount of money by switching to GoDaddy.com.  The fact that GoDaddy.com could also do our web hosting for a very reasonable cost just sweetened the deal, so we made the switch.

Web Hosting
We have been hosting our own web sites for the last 5 years.  From web mail, to blogs, to our small business site, to World of Warcraft Guild sites, to other miscellaneous experiments, we have taken advantage of the flexibility of hosting our own sites.  Now that we are with GoDaddy.com we were able to move the sites we wanted to keep (including refreshing this blog) for a minimal cost.

Internet Service
We have been a very happy Verizon FiOS customer for over 4 years.  We have been using their Small Business class service which costs a bit more than residential, but allowed us to host our own web sites and email server (no inbound port restrictions like there are with residential FiOS) with static IP addresses.  Without the need to host email and web sites any longer (see above), we thought this would be another great opportunity to reduce some costs.  While the techie in me sure does miss the 5 static IPs and wide open hosting opportunities, the additional $ per month just is not worth it for us.

TV Service
We have been DirecTV customers for the last 9 years. We have subscribed to a number of their sports offerings, but most recently were NFL Sunday Ticket and MLB Extra Innings customers. Since we switched to residential FiOS they have some pretty attractive bundles for Internet and TV service combined. Having already made the decision to forgo the sports packages to reduce costs, it seems like a good time to make the switch to FiOS TV. They have all the HD channels we care about and even one that DirecTV still does not (WGN America HD… GO CUBS!). The fact that we wont lose service during heavy rains (with our rainy season approaching) and the multiroom DVR where you can watch things recorded shows from any TV, was just icing on the cake.