“404 Not Found” pages are pretty cool… I mean, if you have a cool 404 page, no one will ever see it unless something goes wrong, essentially. And there are a lot of cool 404 pages out there on the web – they’re just hard to find.
For that reason, I’ve always thought that I should have a cool 404 page. So one fine day, now more than a year ago (the 20th of October, 2007, to be precise), I took a picture of a road sign for the road numbered 404 in Japan. Interestingly, the location is right between the Imperial Palace and Tokyo Station, at the intersection with road number 1.
You can see the sign from another angle on this Streetview shot. The water you see there is the outer moat of the Imperial Palace, and the big avenue, road number 1, is Hibiya-dori.
So last week I finally got around to putting this up on my site. The 404 page just shows this image as a very low quality (i.e. very high compression) jpeg (same effect as the front page background – I like the look of low quality jpegs), with a random flickering that I think really transmits a feeling of brokenness.
So please go ahead and type in a non-existant url to have a look. Now I guess there are only a few dozen http status codes left to photograph…
