Skip to main content

Reserved page in Yahoo! Store

A client of mine asked me to figure out why her order status page - which contained only a simple HTML form - didn't work on her published site. It was a strange phenomenon, the page she created worked perfectly fine in the editor, but on the published site, all it showed was the word OK. This was really strange, as I couldn't see anything wrong with the HTML itself.

Then, I thought, since the form used an outside service to return order status, maybe that service did something to the page. So I took the form out (leaving that order status page basically blank, with only the store header, navigation, and footer on it) and republished. Same thing! Only OK on the published site... Then I looked at the source of that page, and in the source there was nothing else except for OK. Now that was really strange, because in Yahoo! Store you cannot even create a page that does not at least have a regular web page layout like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>No Name>/title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Since this page had none of that, I had a thought and plugged in the same URL but within another Yahoo! Store, my own: http://www.ytimes.info/status.html

Voila! Same result, that page only showed OK - but I didn't even have a status.html page... So I went back to my client's site, recreated the order status page as order-status.html, published, and all of a sudden everything worked great.

Out of curiosity, I tried a few other Yahoo! Stores to see if they also had a status.html page, and as I expected, they all did - and with the same OK and nothing else on it. So I contacted Yahoo! and confirmed:

status.html is a reserved page in every Yahoo! Store used for server monitoring.

So my first conclusion was: don't create a page whose ID (url) is status, it won't work on your published site.

But better yet, you can turn this into a useful feature: create a status.html page in your store, but use it for internal communication for your company. You can put notes there for your staff, instructions, etc. Whatever you put there will only be visible in the editor, not on the published site.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Catalog Request

You may have noticed that both the Catalog Request and Catalog Request Confirmation pages are now customizable through Checkout Manager. If you have already customized your Checkout Manager pages (or had someone customize them for you), and would like to have the same custom look applied to your Catalog Request and Catalog Request Confirmation forms, all you have to do is this: Go into Checkout Manager, click Page Configuration and then look at how your Shipping, Billing, Review, etc. pages are set up; in particular, check if you have the Top Navigation and Left Navigation enabled. Click over to the Catalog Request tab, and make sure you have the same settings next to Top Navigation and Left Navigation. Don't forget to hit Save or Save & Preview , otherwise your changes will be lost. Click over to the Catalog Request Confirmation tab and there too, make sure you have the same settings next to Top Navigation and Left Navigation (so if those are enabled on your other checkout p

CPR for a Yahoo Store on Google's Supplemental Index

Recently a client of mine came to me and said that most of his store pages disappeared from Google, and he did not do anything to make this happen. I was a bit skeptical, so I went to Google, did a search on his store, and sure enough, there were only two pages indexed, his home page and his site map (ind.html) page. The rest were in the supplemental results, which means that Google thought the rest of the pages were not much different than these two pages. When I looked at the supplemental results, the little excerpts under each link were exactly the same, and I also noticed that what Google showed under each result was actually text from the ALT tags of the header image. I looked at some of these pages in my client's store, and they were actually different. This was a bit puzzling, but then I thought perhaps Google saw that the header and left navigation was the same throughout the site (which is pretty normal), but that the text that made each page different was too far down ins

Auto-update Copyright Year

This is one of those minor, recurring questions I'm always asked (each year): to update the copyright year in sites. Whether this is the "right thing" to do or not I don't know, but here is how you can make it automatic: First, go to the Variables page (these instructions are for Yahoo! Stores), and do a search for the word "copyright" or the year that's currently displayed next to your copyright message. If you can't find it there, chances are you have a custom template and the copyright message might be coming from some place else. In that case, you'll have to track it down, but because custom templates can be set up in any which way, unfortunately you'll be on your own. Assuming you found it, replace the year with this JavaScript code: <script>document.write(new Date().getFullYear())</script> Hit Update and you should be all set!