HTTP Status Dogs (2011)

[MattKimber]

One surprisingly practical use I found for things like this; when internal tools throw up a 404 or a 503 with the usual default status page, people assume "oh it's not working, I'll try again later".

When they get an unexpected cat (or dog, in this case) they tend to go and ask their tech team, "what's with the cat?" It's not a substitute for good logging and alerting in any way, and is totally unsuitable for environments where internal tools need to appear professional and sensible, but as a way to get people to pay attention when something goes wrong then a cute animal can work a lot better than a "normal" notification.

[SamuelAdams]

Plus it’s gonna send a lot more data over the network. A typical 404 is just a few lines of text. But these are an entire image blob.

[doggodaddo78]

Cool > professional. "Professional" is boring. ;)

[thanatos519]

If internal tools need to appear professional and sensible, then there's a serious culture problem and I don't wanna work there.

[jjgreen]

Fabulous, inspired by https://http.cat/ of course

[wongarsu]

http.cat is surprisingly useful because of the short url. Typing in e.g. http.cat/422 beats any other method I know for quickly looking up status codes by number.

[geokon]

Dumb question, but how does this work? .cat isn't listed as a TLD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

[leonvonblut]

amazing! thanks

[kypro]

Might be okay on a humour site, or perhaps in an internal tool, but some of these are a bit tasteless IMO. It could be far more useful if you were able to pick from a selection of individual images or image sets depending on the usecase. Although even then these kinds of http error images scream early-2000s web humour to me.

[Sebb767]

> Although even then these kinds of http error images scream early-2000s web humour to me.

I think that's the point and it's a nice throwback :)

But otherwise I agree, https://http.cat/ is far more harmless. Some of those dog pictures would probably not fare well when a less humorous colleague sees them.

[trollied]

I've often wondered why most sites expose these status codes to the end user. The end user does not need to know, and in most cases will probably be confused by it. Plainly worded messages should be presented in the case of errors, not half an RFC.

[dale_glass]

You can set custom pages for all of those, and they can be helpful and informative.

An Error 500 page used in an internal service could tell you something like "Try again in 5 minutes, and call Joe if it still doesn't work".

An Error 410 page can spell out "We used to have this, but don't anymore because it was obsolete. Please look here for a replacement instead."

The defaults are just that, simple defaults, and these days typically overriden by the web browser to show something more user friendly.

[makeitdouble]

It makes it a ton easier to assist the user when they come to support (“It’s broken” doesn’t go very far, knowing it’s a 500 for instance can help fast track the demand, whatever the actual problem is).

Of course it doesn’t stop you from rendering a nice and plainly worded error.

[codetrotter]

HTTP 420 is not official. It’s just what Twitter API used to return before 429 existed.

[thenoblesunfish]

I hadn’t heard of code 418 before - seems like it started as a joke but is now “real” because people use it!

[wongarsu]

It has a proper RFC and everything [1].

All the April Fools RFCs are worth a read imho [2]. RFC2100 (The Naming of Hosts) and RFC8135 (Complex Addressing in IPv6) are real gems.

1: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...

[palsecam]

Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24206899

I myself use 418 as a reply to mean bots. Fun + makes filtering logs easier.

Nginx config snippet:

  # Nothing to hack around here, I’m just a teapot:
  location ~* \.(?:php|aspx?|jsp|dll|sql|bak)$ { 
      return 418; 
  }
  error_page 418 /418.html;

Example: https://FreeSolitaire.win/wp-login.php

[ddek]

I had a really painful experience with NPM where it was responding 418 and almost no extra info. I had not asked it for a NuGet package.

[doggodaddo78]

At most early projects and cool clients, I'll throw together some goofy custom status pages for internal and sometimes public-facing websites and portals. BSOD, Chuck Norris quote generators, web games like Tetris, and so on.

[alberth]

It’s not a dog but still my favorite 404 is

https://media4.giphy.com/media/6uGhT1O4sxpi8/200.gif

[acanguven]

501 and 206 are really disturbing.

[blowski]

Disturbing?

[marenkay]

Those are really cute!

You can optimize these a bit more using the Kraken.io web interface: https://kraken.io/web-interface

Tried with a few and it shrinks them down ten to 20 percent savings without losing quality.

[edd19]

The http 206 is disturbing.

[andix]

How do I install them on my nginx or Apache?

[anxiostial]

and this is why I became a web developer.