Live data from Hacker News

HTTP Cats

http.cat

51–60 of 94 posts

Re: HTTP Cats

#51
Couple of years ago I worked as a full stack web dev for a electronics distributor.

At that time we had a couple of DB problems, it would get overwhelmed, shit itself and our page would show an error. I found some time and, instead of fixing the error (duh ;P), I downloaded around 20-30 funny cat gifs, assigned each a funny caption and modified the error page so that each would show randomly.

Next time the DB shit itself, the error page showed up and the cats wrought refresh chaos upon Apache but it took it in stride since the error page was mostly static.

Everyone was delighted but after around 15 minutes I got a call from sales asking my to take the cats down. „It’s not very businessy, take it down!”. „The site is down either way, would you rather our clients stare at a dry message or something funny?”. „Dry message! Take it down”. „No” and I hung up. So proud of myself that I stood up to them. I think the cats are still up to this day ;)

The point of this story is that http.cat made me think of those cat pages, thanks!

Re: HTTP Cats

#53
post #22

I unironically use this website everytime I forget a status code at work. The name is instantly memorable, it loads immediately, and I can ctrl-f it. It's basically muscle memory at this point.

I always post a cat from it whenever I need to specify a response code in an issue ;)

Re: HTTP Cats

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I know and see several of the codes all the time. But occasionally I encounter a weird one and I always go to http.cat to find out what it is.

i still don't understand 409 errors. saw one for the first time a few weeks ago

Key violation in your database? Can't insert the record because the key already exists? Thus conflict

Re: HTTP Cats

#55
I still do this day mourn the old httpstatus.io or whatever it was domain that got acquired a few years back and became completely useless. This one endures and I love it. This one stays bookmarked but at least the MDN page on status codes now pops up as the first useful link when you search for "http status codes"

Re: HTTP Cats

#57
post #7

Do any browsers recognize a 420 response code?

Your browser (if you're using one of the "usual ones") doesn't really do much with the response's status code if it doesn't match a few specific ones for redirecting/caching/protocol shenanigans. Anything in the 4XX range is going to be treated as just a regular ol' response, just like 404. (You could serve an entire site with all responses set to status=404, and be fine... other than probably never getting any cache…

204 has weird behavior in Safari and Firefox for example. Entering a URL returning 204 in the URL bar will not change the URL bar to it, leaving its contents to whatever was there before. Similarly if you click on it it would not actually navigate to the page.

URL to test: https://httpbin.org/status/204

Post reply on HN