Better 404 design

There are exactly three things I want from a 404 page:

1. Something approaching an apology
2. An easy way to report the broken link
3. Copy that might elicit a sensible chuckle

This page only took a few minutes to make. The "let us know" link pre-populates the entire e-mail and is implemented in a Rails view thanks to a helper method that makes constructing mail_to links a little nicer:

def mail_to_url(email, **options)
  "mailto:#{email}?" + options.map { |k, v|
    "#{k}=#{ERB::Util.url_encode(v)}"
  }.join("&")
end

<%= link_to "let us know", mail_to_url("support@betterwithbecky.com",
  subject: "I got a 404!",
  body: "I clicked a link that led me here, but got a 404 message:\n\n#{request.url}"
) %>

Wish people spent more time sweating details like this.