Errorlytics Captures and Fixes 404 Page Not Found Errors For Drupal, Wordpress, PHP, Rails, and Java

For the past several months, I've been working on Errorlytics, a Software as a Service that captures, analyzes, and helps you fix 404 Page Not Found errors for your Drupal, Wordpress, PHP, Rails, and Java web sites and applications.

The original idea came from my friends and partners at Accession Media (SEO and Internet Marketing experts) and New Evolutions (web application engineers).

Errorlytics is both a small plugin installed on your web site or application, and a hosted service which captures, processes, aggregates, and fixes 404 page not found errors. If you run a site with Drupal, Wordpress, straight PHP, Ruby on Rails, or Java, then Errorlytics can help you.

After installing the open source (and small) plugin, you let the hosted service begin to capture the 404 page not found errors. You can then begin to handle those errors by telling Errorlytics where you want to redirect your visitors. The next time a visitor encounters a 404, they will be transparently redirected to the correct page. They never know that Errorlytics is even involved!

Errorlytics results in a better experience for your visitors, because they will eventually stop seeing 404 responses. Even more importantly, Google and other search engines will notice that your 404 rate is decreasing, which improves your Search Engine Optimization.

As a web site administrator, you can log into Errorlytics to see a Dashboard of unhandled errors, receive daily emails, or even subscribe to an Atom feed. Handling an error and redirecting a user is incredibly simple. All rule configuration is performed using simple English statements, thus no programming is required!

We're really proud of what we built, and Errorlytics has already handled over 1 Million errors for our clients. There are subscription levels for every size web site, so create an account today. We're always interested in hearing what we can do to make Errorlytics even better, so please don't hesitate to let us know what you'd like in the Errorlytics Support Forums.

For those interested in such things, Errorlytics is built with Ruby on Rails and hosted at Slicehost.

Display Javascript Confirmation When User Leaves a Web Page

Update: the original code did not work in Internet Explorer 6 or 7. This is because change events for form elements do not bubble in Internet Explorer. That is lame. In any case, the included code has been tested for Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Our customer wanted to warn users that if they leave the current page with unsaved changes, those changes will be lost. The requirement is to only show an alert/confirmation when the user has changed the form but did not submit the form. However, don't forget that if the user changed the form but then clicked Submit, no confirmation or warning should be displayed (as they are saving the changes before they leave the page via the submit.)

The following Javascript is one way to do it. Note that I am using both Prototype and Ext JS in this snippet.

Ext.onReady(function() {
Ext.namespace('Dses');
Dses.formChanged = false;
$$('form.watch-for-changes').each(function(form, index) {
form.getElements().each(function(element, elIndex) {
element.observe('change', function() { Dses.formChanged = true; });
});
});
$$('form.watch-for-changes').each(function(form, index) {
form.observe('submit', function() { Dses.formChanged = false; });
});
window.onbeforeunload = function () {
if (Dses.formChanged) {
return "You have unsaved changes in your form.  You may wish to save the form before leaving this page.";
}
}
});

Note that this requires any form that you want to monitor for changes to be given the class watch-for-changes.

Read up on more details and information on Javascript, the back button, and window.onbeforeunload.