 The (broken) Da Vinci code challenge
Thursday, 16 February 2006
Sony are at it again.
This time it’s Sony Pictures contributing to the web monkeys of the year awards.
As the Melbourne Age reported, Sony has decided to respond to the ongoing criticism of it’s upcoming film, The Da Vinci Code (based on the book of the same name) by putting up a website to:
Post essays by about 45 Christian writers, scholars and leaders of evangelical groups who will pick apart the book’s theological and historical claims about Christianity.
Deciding that this might be an interesting way to spend half an hour, I point my browser to the brand new, shiny website:
http://thedavincichallenge.com/
No luck. Instead of some theological and informative essays, I get an “under construction” error:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is usually a sign that their web server is misconfigured and the user “workaround” is to access the “www” subdomain of their website, by adding a “www.” before the website name.
That works.
However, I decide to contact their website administrators, just in case they’re not aware of the problem.
I know, how awfully kind of me.
Doing an online “whois” query on the domain name shows the contact as postmaster@thedavincichallenge.com. Ok, so I send them an email explaining the problem and within about 30 seconds my email bounces with:
“Unknown address error 553 - Sorry, relaying denied from your location [xxx.xx.xxx.xxx]”
Looks like their mail server is misconfiguted too.
Back to the website, I look around for a means to contact anybody, via some online contact form perhaps. Nothing there. However, clicking on their “privacy policy” link gets me an unexpected error:
Unexpected error, that’s for sure. I certainly wasn’t expecting to get all that debug information as well.
What else could go wrong? I don’t know, as I no longer care.
One of the first lessons I learnt working on web projects is to make sure that the website is actually working before you unleash it on the public.
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Another site that uses "Confusion", sorry thats, "Coldfusion". Anyway, the domain owners don't care too much about setting up their mail servers.
Mailservers are required (RFC822 6.3, RFC1123 5.2.7, and RFC2821 4.5.1) to accept mail to "postmaster".
Hey guys! It was either a temporary issue, or, too many people complained! It seems to be fixed and accessible now! Got to go ... (need to check its contents!) TrishZ
Most of it works. Their "tell a friend" page also produces an "unexpected error", although, considering the previous botch up, I did expect that.
Looking at the source code of the pages that do work, reveals that they've built it to comply with XHTML but forgot to read up on the specifications. So, as a result the website is not valid. Running the validator on their home page shows 73 errors:
This is broken
P.S. Just tried sending another email to their postmaster and guess what? It bounced again.
Definite candidates for the web monkeys of the year awards.