We lost a page. The Pixel Pals went looking.

It's Sunday, so this one is small and silly.

Most of what we build is about the moments that matter: an agent about to send, pay, publish or delete, and a person getting the last word first. We take that seriously. But every website also has a page nobody plans to visit, the one you land on when a link is old, mistyped or simply wrong. On most sites it says "404" and nothing else, and you leave a little more annoyed than you arrived.

We thought a dead end could at least be a friendly one. So we sent the Pixel Pals out to look for the missing page.

The search party

Follow any link on deliverd.dev that goes nowhere and you'll find a big blocky "404" with a Pixel Pal standing in for the zero. Underneath, all six pals stand in a row on a little shelf and take turns reporting back on their search. None of them has found it. They have opinions about that.

A few of the reports you might get:

• Biscuit (Byte Dog): "Not under the sofa. I checked twice."
• Biscuit again, trying to be helpful: "I fetched the homepage instead!"
• Mittens.exe (Pixel Cat): "I looked. Briefly. From here."
• B0T-9000 (B0T): "Beep. Searched 0 of 0 pages."
• Sir Quacks-a-Lot (Debug Duck): "I debugged it. It's gone. You're welcome."
• Inky (Octo): "I opened 47 tabs. Still no."
• Boo.dll (Ghost.exe): "Wasn't me. Probably."

They report on their own every few seconds. Press any pal and it answers you straight away with its next line, so you can interrogate the duck for as long as you like. He will not admit fault. He never has.

The page itself sums up the expedition: they came back with a rubber duck, a cold coffee and no page.

Press the zero

The pal in the middle of the "404" is a button. Press it and another pal takes its place. Press it enough times to see every one of them and they throw you a small party, with confetti and a verdict: "You found every Pixel Pal. Still no page, though."

That is the only thing there is to find on the page. We checked. Twice. Under the sofa.

It still does the boring job

A joke page that left you stuck would be a bad joke, so the 404 still does the job a 404 is for:

• It tells you what probably happened. The link may be old or the page may have moved, and if someone sent it to you, they may need to share it again.
• It gets you somewhere useful. There's a button home, a button to open Deliverd, and links to the Docs, Pricing, the Blog and Contact us, which is where most people who get lost were heading.
• The pals are polite. They keep still if your system asks for reduced motion, stop chattering when the tab is out of sight, and can all be pressed from the keyboard. A screen reader hears a pal's line when you ask for it, not every few seconds while you're trying to leave.
• Search engines don't index it. Nobody should land on a page about not finding a page from a search.

Go and get lost

Try it now: deliverd.dev/somewhere-that-isnt-real. Make up any address you like; they'll go looking for that too. Press the zero six times. Ask the cat for an update and enjoy the answer.

And if you find the page they're looking for, please let Biscuit know. He's been very brave about it.

Happy Sunday.