09.46, Wednesday 21 Jun 2000

Question: Dirk now works by parsing the path in the url /dirk/path. This is useful [extra information is in the 'title' attribute of the span around 'useful'. You can tell by its colour]. I've done this by putting an ErrorDocument 404 in the .htaccess of /dirk/ with an internal redirect to the main cgi which returns a status 200 OK so older browsers don't get confused. Randal L. Schwartz has a column on a 404 handler that dynamically generates icons.

Now here's my problem. Every access to a url under /dirk/ gets listed in Apache's errorlog: Ugly. http-analyze lists all of these in it's Not Found report. Okay I can make http-analyze ignore anything under /dirk/ but it's not an elegant solution.

So my question is: How can I let Apache know that 404s under /dirk/ aren't really errors and to record them as hits instead? Is there a better way of achieving what I've done? All this given that I can only use .htaccess, not httpd.conf, and mod_rewrite isn't available. Your thoughts most appreciated.