Today is my second day of being back online since moving hosts to GoDaddy from WebHost4Life. I would like to say the process was painless, but I had to call tech support at GoDaddy 5 times to get my hosting account setup right (Win Web vs. Windows). This undocumented but important configuration settings, will determine if you can or cannot run PHP on Windows at GoDaddy. So if you plan to sign-up for a Windows account and to run a PHP application (like WordPress), then make sure you call and order a “NON-GRID” account…
Now that things are back up and running I’ve noticed that I’m getting lots of hits on my old permalinks. I had some problems in moving things off my old host since each button click on their site would take 3-5 minutes (and time out 90% of the time). To help track what was happening, I set my 404 to go to WordPress’s “index.php” so I could track the hits and throw a pretty 404 message. After getting something setup, I decided I wanted to show a list of my posts so the user could quickly find what they are looking for. Since people only hit my Web Development posts, I inserted the logic below into my 404.php using the WordPress Editor under Appearance.
<?php
$out = '';
$query = array();
$query[] = 'category=web development';
$query[] = 'numberposts=100';
$posts_to_show = get_posts( implode( '&', $query ) );
$out = '<ul>';
foreach ($posts_to_show as $post_to_show) {
$permalink = get_permalink( $post_to_show->ID );
$out .= <<<HTML
<li>
<a href ="{$permalink}" title="{$post_to_show->post_title}">{$post_to_show->post_title}</a>
</li>
HTML;
}
$out .= '</ul>';
echo $out;
?>
This little snipped is based on the WP Show Post Shortcode. I basically hard coded the query category and set the number of result to 100. This results in a list of my last 100 blog posts, sorted by date posted.
If you want to see it in action, type in a invalid URL to my site and you’ll get a 404 with a list of links to my blog posts!
Note… This is not going to help with search engine rankings because it’s a 404 error page. My goal was to give the lost visitor quick access to my development posts, since I’m 99% sure they used an old link indexed by Google.