Hidden Pages

Easter egg

In »Page (Not) Found«, I wrote:

Ideally, you’ll never end up on the 404 page on this site.

Well, there are already three pages on this site that link to 404, four if you include this page about hidden pages. (Five if you include the hidden pages.) So even if you never end up there, search engines will find it. They are not allowed to index it, but still.

There are however two truly hidden pages here. And only the second page counts as an Easter Egg.

Portfolio

A portfolio—well, actually just a placeholder for a portfolio—exists for historic reasons. Version 2 of this site had a ‘Work’ entry in the main navigation. The page is still there, but not maintained. If I ever attempt to create a portfolio, it will end up on a dedicated subdomain, so the portfolio placeholder is rather useless. No other page links to /work/, so this Easter egg page cannot make an exception. If you want to see it, you have to manually type in the URL. (If I’m completely honest, one page does link to the portfolio, but it happens to be the second hidden page.)

A very special index page

The second hidden page has been here for a long time. It is the “index of unlisted pages”. On all the index pages on this site there are lists of blog post previews. Each preview is presented by showing the title, which also acts as the link to the actual post, a short description, and a thumbnail image. There are however lots of additional pages, including the index pages. Those are usually never presented in preview form on any index page. That’s sad, they too have all it takes; a title, a description, and a thumbnail image.

This is where the “index of unlisted pages” enters the picture. On this page, every page that is not presented elsewhere in preview form is listed here. And although the path makes no sense, this page can be found under /about/about/.

More to come?

Additional hidden pages are on the idea pile, because there are at least two paths on this site that lack an index.html page. If you’d use your address bar as your command line, then those paths would result in 404.

Which brings this piece of writing full circle, and to a close.