Happy "Page Not Found" Day!

USA Today's polymath Angela Gunn linked to Ghost Sites today (thanks, AG!) with the intriguing suggestion that the world celebrate April 4th as "Error 404" Day. Angela suggests a number of activities which might be appropriate today, including simply logging off and taking a walk around the block. Here are a few others:

1. Deliberately break a link on your Blog or Website and see how long it takes for somebody to notice it.

2. Modify your ROBOTS.TXT file to thwart that sneaky GoogleBot from indexing your site for 24 hours. Take that, you nosy search engine - go bother somebody else!

3. Spend a few hours at the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine laughing at how stupid your old Web site looked back in 1999. Stop laughing immediately if you notice that it looks exactly as stupid today.

4. Study the incredibly arcane history of the Error 404 Message.

5. Pore over a few good Dead Blogs.

6. Take your favorite Star Wars Action Figurine from its dominant position on top of your monitor, replacing it with a Tim Berners-Lee action figure.

7. Pay a visit to DejaVu.org, fire up the site's Antique Browser Simulator, and see how long you can surf the Web using the first version of NSCA Mosiac without going crazy.

8. Cry a few tears for some of the incredibly popular Web people who are now almost completely forgotten by the surfin' hordes.

9. Go to EBay, type in "386SX Laptop" and see what comes up. Don't buy any such laptops that are priced above $1.99.

10. Download the Lynx Browser (believe it or not Lynx is an enormously useful tool if you're in the Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing field). If you don't have the patience to do this, see how your Blog or site looks in the Lynx Viewer. Arghh!!!!

11. Pong! (Pong has nothing to do with Web History but it sure is antique).

12. Kick a Web 2.0 Blowhard today!