I’ve been working on a 404 error page for the theme that I use here, Subtle.
I wanted to add error page support to the theme so I could utilise the error tracker plugin for Mint and also get search engines to adjust their listings for the website.
I wrote a funky bit of PHP code, which was inspired by A List Aparts: The Perfect 404 post.
What it does is look for a referral from a listed search engine and then get the keywords used in the search. It then assigns those keywords to the variable $new_search . That variable can then be used to populate your own search form.
< ?php // Here we do some intelligent search engine 404 checking // This allows us to show some links to possible relevant content if(strlen($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) > 0) { // We have a referer value somewhere // Look for a search engine query $engines = array('google.co', 'looksmart.co', 'altavista.co', 'msn.co', 'yahoo.co'); for($I = 0; $I < count($engines); $I++) { $found = strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $engines[$I]); } if(strlen($found) > 0) { // We have a search engine.. // Split the referal up to get query used $query = explode('?', $found); $parts = explode('&', $query[1]); $part_count = count($parts); // Find specific search terms based on differing search engines $style = array('q=', 'p=', 'ask=', 'key='); $style_count = count($style); // start by looping through the URL parts for($s = 0; $s < $part_count; $s++) { // Match url parts against search query types for($t = 0; $t < $style_count; $t++) { $terms = strstr($parts[$s], $style[$t]); if($terms == true) { // finish loop as we've found what we need $s += $part_count; $t += $style_count; $terms = explode('=', $terms); } } } // Search terms to echo in the search box $new_search = str_replace('+', ' ', $terms[1]); } } ?>
I’m sure the code could be tidied up a bit, but it does its job. Feel free to use it for your purposes!
I had a brilliant trip up to the Lake District with Tim and Lorna last weekend. We went to get some climbing in before out trip to Italy in a few weeks time.