Yousef Ourabi

Dear Digg,

I’m a huge fan. I check our site a few times a day. However, there is one thing that has really been bugging me. The maintenance page. Whenever you throw up that oh-so-useful page full of links to the favorite sites of your employees… you return an 200 status code.

Think of me not as a big fan, but rather an eager web-crawler from Google or some new startup. When I find my way to your page, and your error page is return a 200 Status (OK) — I take it to mean that everything is hunky dory, and this content is really what you are all about.

Let me school you on this radical bit of information: You can return other status codes — such as 500 — and return a pretty html document containing all the links to your favorite sites.

Speaking of documents…

There is one document in particular I would like to refer(get it…) you to: rfc 2616. Section 10 is particularly relevant titled “Status Code definitions.” The most relevant among this list are the following status code: 200, 304, and 503. I mention these because there seems to be a certain level of confusion among your engineers.

200: OK — This is what we meant to serve out, and feel free to associate this context with our URI

304: Not Modified: A cache setting, meaning “No Update” use cached version

503: Service Unavailable: Bingo! Doesn’t that sound like something we would want to return as our status when we have our maintenance page up? For extra browny points, consider sending Retry-After header with some amount of time…

Here is the output from Live HTTP headers on one of these requests.

Thanks again!

Yousef

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: digg.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13)
Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plai
n;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:38:53 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:52:50 GMT
Etag: “714c87-15e9-449c1d5b88c80″
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=10000
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Cache-Control: private
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 2069
———————————————————-
http://digg.com/img/down.png

GET /img/down.png HTTP/1.1
Host: digg.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13)
Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13
Accept: image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://digg.com/

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Age: 2027
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:04:19 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive
Via: NS-CACHE: 100
Etag: “720139-89b-41414d62cbc00″
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Thu, 18 May 2006 19:13:52 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 2203
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=9998
Content-Type: image/png
———————————————————-
http://digg.com/favicon.ico

GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1
Host: digg.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13)
Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13
Accept: image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Age: 2932
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:49:13 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive
Via: NS-CACHE: 100
Etag: “2884541-47e-418dfb6884480″
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:57:06 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1150
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=9997
Content-Type: image/x-ico

Filed under: Semantic Web