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Starting today, I have decided to showcase my very first “Fail of the Week.”  Each week I will write a quick post about a fail that I think everyone should see and laugh at.  If I miss a week or post more than one in a week just deal with it–”Fail of the Week or sometimes more or less than once a week” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

I found this first fail while looking though tutorials on migrating from one permalink structure to another in this very blog.  If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it.  In non-techie terms, all of my posts have had a permanent web address and I am now changing that address.  Anything that points to the old address (for example, Facebook) would return the dreaded “404 – Page Not Found” error when looking for that post at the old address.  There are numerous WordPress plugins for making this switch painless and while reading through one of them I came across the following link that would supposedly help out:

That’s right–a supposed tutorial on how to avoid 404 errors returned a 404 error itself.  Fantastic.  How exactly can someone be so careless as to write an article about avoiding an error but then screw up so bad that it returns that very error?  I cannot even begin to describe how happy the unbelievable irony of this whole thing makes me.  I give this fail an ”A” for descriptive title but an ”F” for actually implementing the solution being (apparently) talked about.

Overall, I’ll give this fail 3 out of 5 “IE 6′s.”

(For the rest of these “Fail of the Week” posts I will be using a rating scale of 1-5–1 being a pseudo-fail and a 5 being a full-on fail.  This week I chose to represent the fail rating in terms of Internet Explorer 6.  IE6 was one of Microsoft’s biggest failures and even they want it to go away.  Spoiler alert, a future FotW will show just how bad IE6 sucked.)

Well, I hope you enjoyed this first Fail of the Week and look forward to more as I come across stupid crap on the Internet and perhaps even out in the (*gasp*) “real world.”  If you have a great fail that you would like me to showcase send it my way.