Well, This Just Sucks

I hate it when April Fool’s Day falls on a Saturday.

’Cause it means that pretty much everyone who has a life is actually out living it, instead of following every little development on the ’net.

So no, for anyone who’s still wondering, this site was not shut down by Homeland Security. But that gag was the best I could do on short notice (meaning not that I didn’t know April 1st was coming, but that I was swamped with end-of-fiscal-year goodness and couldn’t prepare anything really remarkable). I suppose I was helped out by the fact that any actual shutdown notice probably wouldn’t have resulted in a particularly well-designed error page. Though I thought that the bit of code that actually tracked the visitor’s IP address might have caught a few of the more... cautious among you.

If I really wanted to catch folks, I suppose I could have left the fake site up for a few days. But really, the whole point is to do it on April first. Otherwise, it’s just called “being a dick.”

So for anyone who still wants to see what this site looked like on the first of April, I’ve archived it here. And for those of you who are curious about the degree of my prank-playing obsession, I did at least take the time to alter the most common search-result pages (like the ambigram entry) to automatically forward to the shutdown page. But I still wish I’d managed to catch a few more people. I still miss the days when the number-one Google search for my name brought up a site dedicated to pointing out what an asshole I was.

Ah, those were the good ol’ days.

Maybe next year.

Technorati tags: April Fools, Homeland Security, Censorship