When I moved a bunch of URLs around for my new site, I knew I’d probably miss a couple of redirects and serve up 404s (file not found) for things I shouldn’t. I created a little plugin to help me with this.
404 Notifier keeps a log of 404 (file not found) hits on your web site, along with the referring URL if there is one. You can receive e-mail notifications of these hits, or you can subscribe to an RSS feed of them (recommended).
The download is available on my WordPress Plugins page.
If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.
This post is part of the project: 404 Notifier. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
Neat – I like having the logs. Another approach that emailed the dB errors was here: 5thirtyone.com
Thank you, good sir. One more beer for the tab I owe … I better drive/fly out so you can collect before the tab gets more expensive than the trip! 😉
Very nice!
A suggestion: The email gets sent as a digest rather than 150 separate emails/day when my search.gif file is missing! :^)
Also, I’m running 2.1 Alpha 3, and the link in the plugin options for the RSS URL doesn’t work. I won’t bother posting the code here…I’ll do it in the support forums as you request.
Thanks for the plugin!
E-mail is for immediate notification, RSS is for monitoring. I have no plans to create a monitoring style e-mail report.
I sure wouldn’t want the flood of email that I would have gotten overnight! [70+ 404s, half of them from a porn referral-spammer with mal-formed URLS (http://ijsm.orghttp:[...]blah/di/dah/)]
But undoubtedly this has value for me: I’m finding little pieces of cruft that I’d forgotten about, and an item-by-item presentation method helps me eat the elephant one bite at a time. 🙂
[So, again with the beer.]
Thanks for this one. I’m also rebuilding my site from scratch and port everything on wordpress, so this plug-in and your Building Alexking.org series of articles prove to be very helpful!
Thank you very much :)!
This a great too – thanks so much for this!
Like the idea, I’ll check it out 🙂
This is outstanding. Thank you very much.
–Chris
Great plugin Alex! My RSS Reader is now piling full of 404s that I never knew about. I’m fixing the ones, but I’m also finding a lot of spam referrals to mtdewvirus.com/http://mtdewvirus.com/blahblah type urls. Most seem to be coming from your-lyrics.info. Are others finding the same? I’ll have to see if I can add this into Bad Behavior somehow.
Whoops…didn’t quite want that to show up as a link. I guess I’ll get more 404s now!
Removing the http:// and the www. seems to have turned the auto-linking off for those.
Nick: Yes, lots of spam is getting through. I wonder if something like Referrer Karma can be used as a pre-filter for the spam?
[The sound you just heard was Alex throwing something at me.]
You could run a plugin check stuff, unset the 404 condition in WP and die – that would keep it from showing up in 404 Notifier.
Personally, after a week I turned it off because I wasn’t seeing any new 404 hits.
I’ll most likely turn it off as well after another week or two (to give the search engines a chance to do their crawling). I’ve found a few 404s here and there that I could fix and that’s exactly what I was looking for.
Great plugin Alex!
Do I win an award for the most emailed 404 notifications? 5,964. I wish I was kidding.
One post got hit by a spammer with the wrong URL and they hammered it thousands of times. In the end, only a few were “real” 404 errors, but it took forever to download all those emails and then delete them.
A digest form by day or week would be an awesome addition, and save these monstrous slams right after you install the Plugin.
I have a lot of 404 errors that come from spammers and other weird links with spaces and trying to force my travel blog to be in permalink form and it isn’t. So I get a lot of 404s that say “.com/this-article” instead of /index.php?p=456″. So those add up really fast and I’d love a digest report rather than an instantaneous one.
Otherwise, it’s great!
As I noted above, I’d recommend using the RSS feed in this situation.
Obviously, but the feed doesn’t help much either as the 404 errors for one link were in the thousands.
I wish there was some way to have the plugin report X number of 404s per link rather than every link. Then I would have one bad link for the 5,892 times it got hammered by the comment spammers, not 5,892 reports. 😉
There could definitely be a report like that – perhaps in the admin interface. I could also include a blacklist for user agent which might be helpful in blocking spambots.
I have to be honest though, adding that kind of functionality is pretty low priority. 🙂
Hello Alex, thanks for this great plugin.
I translated it into French on my blog : http://www.logiste.b[...]04-notifier/
And he is also on WordPress France : http://www.wordpress[...]404-notifier
Thanks again 🙂
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