Years and years ago when I first started DrakNet, I wrote a humorous error page that was (somewhat) satirical, and it was used on DrakNet as it’s 404 message for small amount of time.
Off and on in the years since I wrote it, I’ve seen it posted to forums, joke collections sites, and while some attributed me (or the company) as the author, in most postings my authorship was lost. There are only a few places around the Internet you can see it now (about 150 of them disappeared when Geocities went down), though I’ve seen it reposted again and shared as recently as 2009.
For those not familiar with Neopagan inspirational texts, this satirical prose was inspired by The Charge of the Goddess, and lots of web server errors.
Charge of the 404 Error Goddess
Listen to the words of the Missing Page. I who of old was also called among men 404, Error, Broken Link, screw up, bad page, missing file, “Damn it, where the hell did it go?” and by many other names. At mine altars the youth of various college computer departments across the world made due sacrifice.
Whenever ye shall work on a particular web site, once in the month, and better it be when the Moon is Full and while drinking beverages rich in caffeine, then shall ye gather around the computer and run a link checker to ensure that I will never trouble thee. I, who am the ruler of all neglected web sites and poorly coded home pages. There shall ye gather, ye who are fain to master the test of navigation, yet have not yet won its deepest secrets: to these I will hide as they find that which is broken and code thy site until it is whole again.
And your site shall be free from errors; and as a sign that they be really free, ye shall never, ever use animated background; and ye shall code, ftp, edit, create and write, all to stave off my curse. For mine is the sign of uncaring hands, and mine also is joy of trial and error, for my law is the error.
Keep pure your code, strive ever towards cross-platform compatibility, and let naught stop you or turn you aside. For mine is the password protected door which opens upon the secret mysteries via the .htaccess file as well as the errors of missing pages and overloaded servers, and the no DNS entry error, which is the sign of web site Armageddon.
The Charge of the Error Goddess by Jen Lepp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.