Sean's blog

Added ‘HTTP Status Codes’ to wossis.com

HTTP Status Codes flashcards

This isn’t the most exciting of flashcard sets ever! I wanted something to test a lot of work I’d done behind the scenes with Spinneret (the webserver that wossis.com is built on). It was a good test – it broke it! There was some horrendous code in Spinneret that received requests from browsers and broke them down into header fields and form data / posted files. That’s largely re-written now, and seems to be working perfectly when I uploaded the 40-card HTTP Status Codes flashcard set.

If you’re not familiar with HTTP Status Codes, they’re the very first part of the reply from a webserver when your browser makes a request. You won’t know 200 (OK), that’s what the webserver sends whenever it has what you’ve asked it for! You’ll almost certainly know 404 (Not Found) – you see that at some sites when you ask them for something it doesn’t have, perhaps because of a bad URL or the site provided a page or image once, but no longer does. Some websites occasionally break down while you’re using them, and give you a 500 (Internal Server Error).

I’m struggling to think of any more examples! A lot of status codes are invisible because they’re part of a conversation between your browser and the server that you really don’t need to know about. What status codes have you seen from websites?