Missing Kids on your 404
I saw this idea today here. Simple, We can’t find the page you’re looking for, maybe you can find one of these kids we are looking for. Absolutely brilliant and I have to echo the thoughts of some of the commenters there; It’s a shame we didn’t think of it sooner.
An example of a temporary implementation on my site is here: http://smooshspace.com/foobar which is just a lift of the code from the site linked above stored in a PHP page on my server. Then I inserted an iframe into my wordpress theme’s 404.php template.
I would very much like to make this geo-aware, but it’s not working at the moment. I’ve also considered finding a good canadian source of this data that is easily readable by a php script, but I cannot find any RSS or XML feeds with the data for Canada.
If you are reading from the US, there is a great resource at missingkids.com that has feeds on a state by state basis.
I’m going to keep an eye on any development around this myself and perhaps put my own hat into the ring if I get a chance to do some coding.
The worst part of this is that through all the testing of this today I’ve had to stare at the faces of missing children afternoon. Very sad. 
If you maintain a site, I think it would be great if you were to jump on the bandwagon and get those faces seen!
A list of Canadian missing children can be found here.
Tags: life, missing kids, script
