After casually exchanging yesterday evening with Bernard Leroy about my post on error 404, the possible cause of the error suddenly came clear to my mind. The diffence between publishing the photos in a gallery and having them included in an album, was that necessarily in the latter case the link associated with the photos would generate a longer string of characters as it had to also include the name and location of the album. If ISPs have a limit on the length of links, it could well be that for users getting a “Error 404” message it could well be that the link was truncated or even not transmitted because its length excceeded the limit. This seemed all the more plausible as I had chosen long names for the gallery (“Celebration Geneva April 2001”) and for the page embedding it (“Those were the Days”). And of course it could well be that different ISPs have different limits, thus explaining why Bernard and Pam were experiencing a problem, while everything worked OK for me. It would be also consistent that Bernard experienced the problem with all computers with which he was testing the wikisita access while I never saw this problem with all computers, tablets, smartphones on my side as as I used the same network to access wikisita. Yesterday evening I was quite excited about my idea and so I had some difficulty to get asleep. But I had to wait until this morning to test this finding.

So this morning I quickly created a gallery and and album embedding it, with short names, both embedded in pages with short names too. If I was right there should be no problem with viewing the gallery either when it stood stand-alone or when it was embedded in an album. Bernard, who had earlier reported “Error 404” problems, very kindly accepted to test these accesses. And I was delighted to receive his quick report this morning: both accesses worked. Problem solved!

This short story reminded me of a statement made by Andy Grove, the former charismatic president of Intel, in one of his excellent books about management: when as part of your work in a company, you set to write a document, then the first beneficiary of that work is yourself, because this writing exercise helped you investigate the matters and clarify your ideas.

I had been shocked when reading this statement for the first time as for me writing a document was communicating ideas to others and helping them understand an issue and make a decision or perform some activity. But over time I became more convinced with Andy Grove’s statement, and when writing the first post on the “Error 404” it proved right again!