404 Trap principals
The basic principal of a 404 Trap is that the pages you are displaying to your customers do not exist. (I love this part of the conversation, it confuses so many people.) For the 404 Trap to work you need the web server to start generating a 404 Error message, which in the web server error codes is a 404 Page Not Found error. Once this process is started your webserver will go to your custom error code page and process that page to, for all it knows, create a custom error message. While in fact what your custom error code page really does is create the correct content for the user based on what page was not found, but in fact what they were looking for. (I usually loose some people around here.) Every web server also has a series of environment variables that describe the page that the browser was requesting. In Apache there is a request_uri variable that I use to evaluate what the user was looking for. (I’ll explain this more in the next blog entry.) Once I have this information then I can create a customized script to generate the pages I am looking for.
