What Does This Error Really Mean?

[00:00:00] Introduction to the podcast and today’s topic: Error Messages.

[00:00:23] Host introductions: Phelan Lewis and Greg McKinnon.

[00:01:00] Explaining HTTP status codes and their categories.

[00:03:00] Common errors: 400s (client errors) and 500s (server errors).

[00:04:30] Tips on handling 403 and 404 errors.

[00:07:00] Discussing unique and lesser-known status codes like 418 "I am a teapot".

[00:10:30] Strategies for troubleshooting WordPress issues.

[00:15:00] The importance of keeping track of changes you make to your site.

[00:17:00] Exploring console logs for error messages and troubleshooting.

[00:20:30] Wrap-up and tease for next week’s episode featuring guest Aura on business coaching.

[00:00:00] Hello there. It's that time of the week again, that time for Geek Speak. And this week we are talking about what does that error really mean? So we're talking about error messages. Everyone's had them when you've worked on a website or done anything. If someone Programmed it. They've given you an error message you know how to fix the thing that didn't go how you help And we're going to be talking about that today.

[00:00:23] And of course, my name is Phelan lewis at seymour digital media And i'm greg mckinnon with original 72 [00:00:30] creative Welcome everyone. Yeah, I guess when I came up with this topic for my for my yearly series here, I Maybe I liked the topic, but at the same time, looking at it now, I'm like, it's maybe a little bit misleading because we're going to be talking about what I refer to as HTTP status codes and not all of them are errors.[00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Yeah. I also, I think when we were talking about it as well, like the console log, like inspect element and not getting afraid of what it tells you as well is going to be super important for people as well, that I think we'll go into like Things that I used to just do a quick even if not necessarily you're going to fix it, but at least like reaching out to other developers to be like, Hey, your app broke.

[00:01:21] This is the error message you gave me. At least there's like some way that you can give them information so that they can go fix it. Those ones are also super helpful as well as the HTTP [00:01:30] codes. Yeah, so we'll get into maybe the more common errors that we come across that are thrown on sites a little bit later, but just in general HTTP status codes are basically.

[00:01:46] Codes that will come in to play for what's going on when you make a request for a site and there's a status codes that are just purely [00:02:00] informational. Those are the 100 series status codes. And there's a 200 series status code, which is basically. Mostly success messages. And these happen all the time on your site.

[00:02:12] You never see them because everything's working fine, but they're the success status codes where you start seeing or interacting more with these potential codes is when you get to the 300. Most people have probably heard of redirects. And [00:02:30] obviously we've talked about it in the past on the shows about when it pertains to SEO and things like that, if you're moving URLs, you want to create 301 redirects and these types of things.

[00:02:41] So the 300 series is all redirect based codes. And then the errors really get into the 400s and the 500s. The 400s are client based and the 500s are server based. And later on, like you said, we can get into a little bit more detail about the [00:03:00] 400 and 500, because those are the ones that are actually causing errors that you, we could maybe go into a little bit deeper.

[00:03:09] Yeah, I think that yeah, the 400s and the different 400s as well tell you different things like I've had I had to check in, Like I had a 4403 error and it turns out my login had the token Expired so I just needed to sign back in so like even knowing oh you made a bad authorization code with 403 [00:03:30] Then I was like, oh, I just need to log back in.

[00:03:32] And then everything worked again. So like even knowing a little bit of what they're telling you can easily solve the problem for you. And also find it the, like a quick shorthand as well, that for 400 to five hundreds is 400 is you made a bad request. Like what you asked for was wrong the way you did it.

[00:03:49] 500 is they've got issues like the five hundreds are, they're having a bad day. Come back in a little bit and hopefully they'll be back up. That's there's nothing you can do. Yeah. [00:04:00] Yeah. The average person working on their website, if you come across a 500 error, it's typically not something you can take care of.

[00:04:09] It's a call your hosts or, call your web developer to, get to the bottom of why that's happening. Yeah. Yeah. There, that's definitely a call tech support. Kind of situation of whoever you're making the request of, if they're giving you a 500 either let them know and they'll get back to you or just give them a little [00:04:30] bit of time and they'll probably fix the issue because they're panicked and they're just like trying to figure out that server error that's going on for them.

[00:04:37] Yeah. The other thing too, when it comes to me and troubleshooting over the years is like because I so innately know. When I see something happening on a site instantly, whether it's like a problem with the site, or if it's a problem with the host is very it's very easy to tell the [00:05:00] client right away or give them some feedback.

[00:05:04] Immediately on, Oh, this is a host thing. I'll get in touch with them, find out what's going on. Not that it eases them that their website is offline at the moment, but I guess it almost absolves me of it's not a problem with the site. So leave me alone. A thing. Yeah, or it's one I've done it with clients as well, just doing the [00:05:30] I've reached out to them about this error I'm waiting to hear back, I've started a ticket with them because this is not a thing I can fix for you.

[00:05:37] Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a lot of those of we've had it where, yeah, it's just been like, this is, something's gone terribly wrong and I have to start a ticket and reach out to their support and, but yeah, it's definitely one where the, Knowing the type of error that you're getting will definitely help narrow down who you should be reaching out to or who can actually fix the issue for [00:06:00] you.

[00:06:00] I'd say as well, for the 400s, I find those would be a bit more ambiguous on what they could mean. Cause a, so a 400, just a straight 400 is you made a bad request. Some something in your request in the URL was wrong. And it's not even file not found. It's just, it's a bad request. And it's called bad request 401 are.

[00:06:25] I'm trying to remember those ones. The, cause I know [00:06:30] 402 is, you didn't have the money. You didn't pay the amount, which isn't a real status code. No one's allowed to implement it for any reason. I'm surprised it hasn't become something yet. I know what you were saying about the banks getting on board. With that and stuff, but I can see that maybe at the time that it was suggested, but we're so far down the road and online banking is so common now that I'm surprised it [00:07:00] wasn't.

[00:07:00] Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually, it's specific to how they wanted to implement it. Is that the, so basically the internet's run on two money pipes, those Visa money pipe and the MasterCard money pipe. And how it works is that neither one, one of them wanted to get on board with doing the financing.

[00:07:19] And what happened is the way they wrote the protocol in the 402 error is that it was going to. Through the status codes do a ping to [00:07:30] visa or MasterCard server, find out if you had the money and then ping back the either 200 success or the 402 didn't have the money, but they didn't want to get hooked up at that level.

[00:07:40] So they're actually higher up in the stack. That's what's going on. They're not like all the way down at status code levels that are actually up on like API requests. And that's how it worked out is that they're just higher up in like the kind it's turtles all the way down. How all these internet.

[00:07:56] Like the computers all talk to each other. They're just higher up. And it was actually [00:08:00] more flexible for them to do it at the API level rather than the status code level. Yeah. So you mentioned the 400, which was the bad request. The 401 was unauthorized, which is something you might commonly see if there's incorrect directory rights on on your server and things like that so that's the 401.

[00:08:19] Yeah. Cause it's also like login. If you're not logged in and you try to make a request to a page, then you're going to get the 401. And. And then 402 is money, and then [00:08:30] 403 is Forbidden. Forbidden. Yeah, that's the Forbidden. Yeah, I knew it had to be. Yeah. So that's again, login usually is what it is.

[00:08:37] It's some sort of like you, like when you make a request, you're actually sending information about yourself as well, including like a cookie that may have been assigned by that website. And then I'll have information of I'm actually logged in as a user, but if you don't have that, then it's going to give you forbidden.

[00:08:54] And then the other most common 400 is the 404 not found, which [00:09:00] lots of people come across, and even if you've come across it, you may have come across a really fun page that is a 404. GitHub is my classic 404. If you ever go just go to github. com slash like some random letters. They have their logo as like a, it's their Cat cactopus, like it's a cat octopus.

[00:09:22] And if you move your mouse, he does he moves his arms and he says, this is not the page you're looking for. And he's dressed up as Obi Wan. It's a, if you're [00:09:30] going to do a 404, that's a pretty good one. I got to say I will also give it a shout out is Google. I think they stopped doing it cause it was quite resource intensive, but to show off how service workers work for JavaScript, they actually made that little dino, that runs along.

[00:09:45] Yeah, it actually was a game that you could play and it ran off a service workers to show people how much computing power you could put into the browser, just with a little snippet of JavaScript. And it was like a test case. Cause they wanted to show you how you could do [00:10:00] offline JavaScript. And so that was actually a fully functioning game that you could play until you couldn't jump over all the cacti, it would crash.

[00:10:07] Count your score and then input that back. And it was like a fully functioning game that they built just as a test case for yeah, offline JavaScript. That's neat. I don't think I ever came across it. It was very short lived. I remember hearing about that and I remember seeing the page and then I think that they realized like, Oh, us keeping track of all this stuff would be very resource intensive.

[00:10:29] We're going [00:10:30] to not do that. And then write a blog post about how we did do that.

[00:10:34] Yeah, I don't know the 400 ones, maybe as it ties back to to WordPress specifically, if you typically come across no, a 403.

[00:10:48] It most likely means that the directories on your site are most likely in, have the incorrect rights to [00:11:00] actually run. A specific part of WordPress or something like that. So that's what you would probably look for on your host server is making sure that the directory rights are properly set.

[00:11:17] So that WordPress can run properly. Yeah yeah, I would definitely reach out to the, whoever's the admin for that website, if you're not the full admin and let them know if you're running into a 403, [00:11:30] because it obviously means that you didn't, weren't given the right permission level for whatever it is that you were supposed to do.

[00:11:35] So the, yeah, definitely the website admin, whoever's like taking care of the database and the permissions that they would be the person to ask about that one. The 404 not found is pretty basic. It's basically a page on your site that doesn't exist. So the status code throws up, can't find what you were looking for, a thing, but it could also potentially [00:12:00] indicate that you have a potential permalink issue.

[00:12:04] So if you if you know you do have a page and it does exist, but it's not getting to it or being able to pull it up, it could be that you need to refresh your permalink structure because maybe there was an issue that arose from something you did there. Yeah. As well as if you did just change the permalink structure, there's like a 90.

[00:12:28] 99 percent chance [00:12:30] that you're gonna, it's going to throw you an error for the first like hour because all the internet is basically just updating to whatever your new addresses. And so it'll take time though. So if you do go into that general section and then change the URL structure, it's going to take it's very quick to break URL structures.

[00:12:49] It takes a long time for you to find out that you did it right and that you found it. Fixed everything that's been my experience, it's like, they'll let you know when you got it wrong, but finding out when you did it right, it will take a bit of time. [00:13:00] The other thing to do in, I found in that situation, is go to the page itself, try to like, view the page, and then double check the URL.

[00:13:10] You might've missed that you've subcategorized it. So now it says blog slash name of the blog post. And so if you have that and just double check how the URL structure is, and this is a good time for, if you do have that issue, this is where your 301 redirects are really helpful is as well, is that you can go in as well, [00:13:30] 302 underrepresented, but I still think it's, Kind of interesting of like temporarily changing URL structures, right?

[00:13:37] It's 301 is permanent. 302 is is temporary. I don't know if there's like a penalty for only using 302, but I've never come across the time that I've used a 302. I can't think of a use case for it. Like I, for the life of me could not think of other than, I think if you were going to Switch [00:14:00] around your hosting or something like that, but you're going to switch.

[00:14:03] But yeah, there's no I've never run into a situation. It's always been permanent. Or maybe you want to work on something new, but you want to have all traffic pointing to. Existing. Yeah. See, that's the thing is I can't really think of a use case for it of want to temporarily move all my traffic.

[00:14:24] It's neat to have it as like a tool in your in your arsenal to like pull out when you need it. But I can't really think of, [00:14:30] because any page that would be anything new I would be working on, I'd work on it on a, like a staging or something like that. Or a copied version. The page.

[00:14:36] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so yeah, it was just. I never understood that one for me. I'm going to try to look that up actually to see if anyone has good suggestions on how to use the 302 because like we're talking now, I don't know, and I've never come across the need to be like, you know what I really need right now, the 302 redirect.[00:15:00]

[00:15:00] Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. I could see in like a weird enterprise SEO where if like you have a million page website and you're like, okay, we're going to take these 10, 000 pages that are about this product, they're going offline and we're going to temporarily redirecting to this new, this like a new product line.

[00:15:18] I. I could see something like that. It's weird. When you're at scale and you're dealing with a million websites and you're automating most of your SEO with this kind of stuff, like maybe there's a use case in there, but to me like [00:15:30] it's one of those weird edge cases, like almost like crawl budget where you have to like assign pages that because you have so many pages on your website that you actually have to use crawl budget and say, I want these pages scanned first, these second and these thirds.

[00:15:43] Weird stuff like that, where it's it's just the fact of just being so big that like weird scale issues come out. I could see that as being like a weird temper, like a weird reason he was temporary, but yeah I'd say that's definitely if you're running into 404s, just, I guess I'd surmise it as like double [00:16:00] check in the backend on your pages or your blog posts, try to view the page to make sure that the URL.

[00:16:05] Is what you say it is so that people are linking to it correctly and if it's not then set up the 301 redirect so that it's You know, if you do make any changes, it's all automatically sent over to the new page and it's not Because Google hates broken links. That's what you're going to hear from me.

[00:16:23] Yeah. It's Google does not like it if it hits a 404 on your website. They're quite insistent about it. [00:16:30] Moving on to a couple of maybe notable for X. Errors that you might come across. One could be a request timeout which sometimes like I come across, it's a 403 request timeout, which typically you can't specifically say it's going to be server related or your site related, but basically it's a time out of you've made a request for a page.

[00:16:59] [00:17:00] And either the site or the server has taken too long to be able to process that request for you And throws you a 408 timeout Error. Yeah usually those If that was happening I would definitely be looking at something that's happening on the server. Cause it's usually like the data, basically what happens is the request gets sent, it's acknowledged, but then the return doesn't, the full request isn't returned.

[00:17:28] I came across [00:17:30] this issue before, and it was because of the site talking to the database for information. And it turned out. This client had their hosting their web files all hosted in a data center in one location, and the database was in a complete different data center somewhere else yeah, that's don't do that. Yeah. . So everything was taking [00:18:00] like forever to to process. Yeah, because like as fast as like the, being on the internet is like it is, it's conditional on the speed of light, like the speed of light is still has a limitation itself and as fast as we can get it like sending information to one server request from your house to a server and then into another server and then back again that's going to take a while like that's not, don't do that.

[00:18:25] And you you had an April Fool's. code that you [00:18:30] mentioned. Yeah. So there's one status code that's the best because and it's very British. It's very 70s Monty Python absurdist British humor, which is 418, which is I am a teapot because they were, very nerdy British people that wrote, mostly wrote these status codes.

[00:18:45] And so they just were. Wanted to put a weird one in just because they were bored. And as you can tell the rest of this, it can be fairly dry. So I'm assuming that they were wanting like a little bit of levity to break up the day. Okay. So I didn't know about this one until [00:19:00] you had mentioned it.

[00:19:01] How is it that. You see this or can't, is there something that you can do where it will trigger this honey Easter egg? Yeah. So basically the way it w it, it wasn't meant for modern browsers, right? Most of the status codes were written before that, like. When the internet was basically universities talking to each other and and sending like basically terminal codes, like it's like using your terminal [00:19:30] is the way that they interacted mostly with other computers.

[00:19:32] And it, how it worked is basically like on April fool's day, you would make a request of Hey, could you send me the files on like our Current case study and then they would jokingly send you back like status code 418. I am a teapot It was like a response basically of like rather than 200 or anything like that.

[00:19:50] They would just send that it's like a joke response Yeah, so it's meant for a very different time than the current time that we have Where there's full, [00:20:00] GUI browsers and you can actually interact with pages. That's why people have more detailed like 404 pages. It's the same thing of it's like a joke response, but it's just meant as a response, that you give out in a circumstance to just have fun but yeah, most of these because like We got to remember that yeah, when they, when this was first made the computers that were interacting, we're all like universities because they used to ship the paper to them, like in stacks.

[00:20:28] And then I thought this was [00:20:30] like wildly inefficient. If we have two computers that could talk to each other, why can't they just send the information over? And that's like where most of the status codes come from. It's just, they also realized that the first two computers, which were It's in Carlsbad just north of Sandy.

[00:20:45] It's where the Munger Cube is. I know Carlsbad, I have a family there, but I don't know the university there. Yeah it's give me a sec, I'll think of it. But yeah there's one university there. You probably don't know what university is in [00:21:00] Carlsbad, but Yeah. Oh, it's one of the one.

[00:21:03] It's one of the University of California. , Davies. That's it. It's Davies and UCLA where it needed to talk to each other Because they were like literally shipping like an 18 wheeler full of paper and they were like This is not the best way to do this right And so yeah A lot of that stuff a lot of these status codes come out of that where they're just like hey Why don't we like?

[00:21:23] Send a message like I, I received what you got. Yeah. Um, I'd say also as well, we were talking about this [00:21:30] is like a weird catastrophic failure for WordPress that you can get. So you talk about, I remember you had mentioned the white screen of death. Yeah. White screen of death is common for a lot of people.

[00:21:43] Typically I would say that is Often a issue with plugin conflicts. If you've updated your plugin or something on your site and all of a sudden you're just not getting anything roll back any plugins that you [00:22:00] might've just updated. It could also signify that there's limited PHP resources on the server.

[00:22:07] There's a, is another one that you could look at if you do see the white screen of death as they call it. I wanted to just quickly go through the five hundreds. Cause there's not a lot of the five hundreds that people typically come across, but obviously the 500 itself internal server error would be one of the most common 502 bad [00:22:30] gateway.

[00:22:30] I see Yeah, that's that is the web server hosting. So it's like your your server engine having an issue like NGX. Usually you'll see that 502 NGX bad sir, gateway error. So it's that the thing that was going to build you a webpage is not going to make that request. Yeah. So 502 bag gateway are basically the most common.

[00:22:54] 503 sometimes service unavailable. I've had 503. Those ones [00:23:00] usually were a CDN issue so that their hookup to cloudflare was broken. And the request was the way they had set it up is I was going to request from CloudFlare and they were going to serve me the website, but the service wasn't available, so it just didn't spit anything back to me.

[00:23:16] Yeah. Yeah. So if you come across a 500 internal server error and you have a WordPress site, you're most likely looking at a programming issue. [00:23:30] With your site or something on your site can't run properly because the PHP, maybe you updated your PHP version or you updated something on your site.

[00:23:42] And it requires something that the older PHP version doesn't provide. That can cause you a server error. Yeah, that would be the most common, I think. I think for the 500, yeah, because it wouldn't be a [00:24:00] database error. Cause those would be 404, right? It was basically the request was successful.

[00:24:04] They went and looked for the page that you were looking for and it wasn't there. If you get a 500 error, it's yeah, it's all, I would almost guarantee it's something to do with the PHP is not happy with you. It, that it's the only solution I would see. Just cause we've got a few minutes I wanted to talk about as well.

[00:24:21] the console log. So anytime you like right click on something and something doesn't work the way you expect, what I usually do is I have I [00:24:30] inspect element and I open up the console log because that logs any errors because if they were a good programmer, they were going to spit back an error of something that didn't work correctly.

[00:24:38] And so say you click on a button, I've done this before, clicked on a button and waited for the console log to spit back an error saying like 404 unsuccessful request or something like that. And then at least. With those console logs, you can at least get an error message. And with that, you can actually either Google it, reach out to the web developer or whoever built the plugin and say, Hey, I'm getting this error [00:25:00] message.

[00:25:00] What do you think the problem is? And then they can help you out with getting to the bottom of it because error messages are super helpful for letting other people know, even if you don't have the technical skills, but it's a way to start a conversation with someone who does have those technical skills to be, Hey, I'm getting this message, what does this mean?

[00:25:17] How do I fix this? You wouldn't believe how many times I got client. Calls from clients saying, there's something going on with the site and they profess there [00:25:30] that they didn't do anything. I didn't do anything. The site's just not working, and I'm starting from scratch to figure out, okay, why is it Like what happened?

[00:25:40] How do I figure this out? but so many clients like if you could just Keep track of what you did on your site so that you can relay that to your developer Yeah It would go a long way To, being able to track down what might be going [00:26:00] on. But so many times people just call her like, I didn't do anything.

[00:26:04] And then later you find out, like they updated a bunch of plugins or do did whatever. Yeah. And just. Fess up it's not your fault, like things need to be updated, but please let me know. Don't just keeping track of Hey, I did X thing. And then afterwards it didn't work.

[00:26:22] Like that would be, letting people know just so they have a starting place to be like, Oh, okay. So it's this plugin that's causing a [00:26:30] conflict. Okay. Now you can isolate that as being the issue. Yeah, it's always. It's always good because most people just, if you can give them a hand like the technically minded people of Hey, this specific event, because then they can recreate that event.

[00:26:43] And then with that information, now they can go off and actually debug, like what specifically happened. Because typically the fastest way you could get a site working again if. If something happened is to just basically roll back the plugin that was updated to the previous [00:27:00] version of the sites back and then you can troubleshoot, like, why did that happen or wait for another version of that to be fixed and to be compatible where it won't break your site kind of a thing.

[00:27:13] But that's the, so if you don't have that idea of, you're like, okay, let me turn off this one. Does it do anything? Let me turn off this one. Does it do anything? So it, it'll get you Online faster if you can remember and before we wrap up, you mentioned console log. I [00:27:30] want to let people know If they want to see console log, the easiest way is to hit F12 on your keyboard when you're in your browser.

[00:27:38] And it should pop up the console log for you where you'll be able to click to see that information you were talking about. Yeah, exactly. And then, yeah, the the other. Big one is, yeah, or just right click on something because I usually do the sort of like right clicking on a specific button if I want to inspect that specific thing and then that'll also have the console log will show up as part of that [00:28:00] window.

[00:28:00] It's. It can be intimidating the first time, especially if you don't, aren't doing this intentionally. So don't be concerned when like a whole bunch of stuff pops up. It's, yeah, it's yeah, it's one that you have to get, be prepared for. And just, yeah, but it's all good. And if you're looking for errors, they will most likely be in red.

[00:28:18] There'll be like a red X. That shows that there are errors that you can click and then it'll show you that information. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They're provided that they coded it correctly. They're pretty good [00:28:30] about spitting back error messages. And your browser's really good at letting you know Hey this is something you should be paying attention to.

[00:28:35] Anyway, I, that does it for us this week. Yeah. And I know next week we have you and a guest, I think, is it Aura? It is Aura next week. That is we are going to let you know next week. Cause we're just updating it cause we're the changes. So it's going to be In the realm [00:29:00] of, business coaching and, these times and, it's going to be related to that topic, but the specifics of it, I will have probably early, the start of next week.

[00:29:08] Yeah, it'll be fun to have a new face on Geek Speak. Yeah. And I'll tune in and watch you guys. Yeah, for sure. Sounds good. And until then let us post in the comments if you have any error messages that you find confusing or want, or funny stories like that as well. Alright. Bye for now.

[00:29:27] Perfect. Bye everyone.