A proposal with(out) some meat to it

19 Comments

  1. Jef Spaleta says:

    Can you keep the pencil drawn feel for the search box on the final page? Cuz that’s sort of cool.
    -jef

    1. Using the border-image css property, it’s possible. But we don’t have the infrastructure to support search in fedoraproject.org 🙁

  2. Hylke says:

    The beefy miracle escaped!

  3. I would add a link to the design team thread that lead to that idea:
    http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2011-October/005000.html

    1. mairin says:

      done like a bun!

  4. LOVE IT! DO IT!

  5. Jef Spaleta says:

    Now what error page would make sense for a hot dog sans bun? like a hotdog taking a bath in boiling water? Or sunbathing under a keep it warm all day heat lamp?
    -jef

  6. Emichan says:

    No beefy? that is the biggest fail of all…

  7. This totally made my day.
    Idea: add some small text underneath to the effect of… “Why do we have a hot dog bun on our 404 error page? The story helps explain a little bit of Fedora culture and how the Fedora community works — read more…” and have that link to the Beefy Miracle history page (which we can, ahem, beef up, with things like cgram’s blog post and other historical docs.)

  8. I love the empty bun idea. Total genius.

  9. Awesome!
    It’s these kinds of imaginative touches that are the reason why Beefy Miracle was a great idea…just don’t use its abbreviation:)
    BTW, any chance we can make a new boot animation for F17?

  10. This kind of nonsense is exactly why “Beefy Miracle” sucks as a release name. This kind of joke is unhelpful and confusing for the user.
    If you really want to replace the default 404 page, it should still clearly say what happened, it should try to explain why (the file may have been moved or deleted, there might be a typo in the URL etc.), and it should apologize politely. And that’s it. In particular, it should not waste the user’s bandwidth with a useless picture of an empty bun, and it should not call the error “empty bun error” or something similarly confusing.
    Just because other sites are doing this sort of things doesn’t mean we should, too. I’ve encountered some 404 pages where it wasn’t obvious to me at all that they were 404s. (And I can’t be the only one to whom it wasn’t obvious, I’m not that dumb. 😉 Your mockup at least prints “404” in large letters, which solves the problem for me, but for users who don’t know HTTP error codes by heart, that alone doesn’t help either.) And some are outright scary, making jokes like “your computer is infected with a virus” or so. I don’t find this funny at all.

    1. mairin says:

      You’re taking this way too seriously. Breathe. It’s a hot dog.

    2. We can add the serious boring explanation under the funny one.

    3. Emichan says:

      I think the part that says “We couldn’t find what you were looking for” clearly states the actual error without being scary or requiring you to know http error codes. However, we probably should make that part more prominent.

    4. Jef Spaleta says:

      Kevin, can you point me to a 404 page that provides all the information you are looking for? I’d very much like to know what page does it well enough for you.
      http://www.amazon.com/poop for example is _less_ informative than this mockup.
      so is http://www.google.com/poop
      Hell man, google doesn’t even offer an obvious search box on their page….there’s some deep irony there.
      http://www.facebook.com/poop provides the are you sure you type it correctly text you are looking for. But it doesn’t say 404 in the text at all. So again it doesn’t meet your expectations.
      http://www.microsoft.com/poop
      they don’t say 404 and don’t suggest you typoed anything, but they have a pre-filled bing search box for you with results. That prefilled search box with results something to consider maybe in the final implementation if things go that far.
      Cute hotdog puns aside the text on this page says its an error, and that the contents might have moved, and offers you a search box. Is the text being presented confusing? Maybe? Can it be localized well? Do we need to worry about localization of the 404 error page text? Does the text make sense for people who have the graphics loading turned off?
      You might have a valid beef with the particular phrasing of the textual elements and perhaps the hotdog story should be told strictly in the graphical elements. I think it would be very possible to get the smile inducing effect out of just the graphical elements and still have the textual elements be more direct and punless/bunless.
      -jef

  11. I sort of laughed at the condiments littered on the ground to fill out the image: it left me with the thought that the Beefy Miracle was streaking off in the wilds of the internet somewhere, majestically.

  12. Googling the other day turned up some company in China that will make custom-printed spam tins. Best. Fedora-branded. Schwag. Ever!
    (OK, the catch is that you need to order at least 20,000…)

  13. I approve this sausage.

Leave a Reply to Paul W. FrieldsCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.