Other

The 404 page has a spider in it that falls apart when you arrive. It is the most complained about feature of the whole site. The failed list in the labs keeps the attempts that did not survive, so nobody has to build them twice... The complaints come from people who mistyped an address, which is their right, and from people who took the page for a crash, which is our fault.

The spider is drawn in pieces and it comes apart in stages. It does not die. It simply stops holding itself together, which is a more accurate description of a missing page and a more cheerful one. The pieces settle, and the text underneath says what happened in plain words, with a way back to the part of the site you probably wanted.

Several people wrote to say the page looked broken. That is a fair reading of a collapsing spider on a pale background, so we changed the framing slightly. The collapse happens a moment after the page settles, so the words arrive first. You learn what went wrong before you watch anything fall apart.

The failed list in the labs is the other half of the feature. Every prototype that did not work is still there with its notes, so an idea that failed once does not have to be built twice to be judged again. Several of them have been picked up and finished since.

The spider here is not animated. It is the one picture on the site allowed to be still, which is fitting, since a page that cannot be found has already stopped moving.

Sometimes a post is about a bug we never fixed, or a question from a reader that deserves a longer answer. Those live here, filed under nothing in particular. Read them if you are curious enough. They are short, and there are only a few... This is where the loose threads go, including the ones we are not going to pull.

The bug we never fixed: on very wide screens the reading column sits slightly left of the true centre of the page. It is a one line change in a layout rule, and it has stayed undone for two months because the column only looks wrong when you measure it. We have decided to live with it rather than spend an afternoon proving that we noticed.

The question we get most often is why there is a spider at all. The honest answer is that the spider is the most patient thing in the room, and it suits a business that mostly waits for pages to be written. We keep it because a different animal would have to be explained.

Another reader asked whether the writing here is written by people. Most of it is. Some of it is drafted with a machine in the room, and those pieces say so in a note at the end, because the process is part of the work and hiding it would make the rest of the writing less trustworthy.

That is the whole idea of this shelf. Small things, honestly described, filed under nothing in particular.