It’s another year of the major internet holiday, and once again there’s a lot of half-assed April Fools “Pranks”. This time, however, I decided to compile a list of the ones I saw and explain why they suck.  Most are fake products.  Lots are straight-up marketing.  They’re all stupid.

This is by no means a comprehensive list (that would take way too long), but is just the ones I saw that made me say “lame”.

What Sucks

“Google Goes Nuclear” (TechCrunch) – Google to use its own nuclear powerplants.  Nevermind that this was actually published a day early, but the idea is even stupid.  It probably had the same amount of thought as the rest of their posts — about none.

“Store Anything In Google Docs” (Google) - Put your apartment in Google docs.  Ok, it probably took about 2 minutes to think of the idea, another 5 to write down some “user reviews”.  There was absolutely no planning involved, and I doubt it tricked anyone.  If I wanted to read crap like this, I’d read theonion.

“iCade” (ThinkGeek) – While this one is actually believable, it still falls short of Fooling anyone.  Does it make anyone look stupid?  Nope, just Apple.  This “prank” was designed just to get traffic to the site (by targeting a high-profile item like the iPad), and is not clever in any way.  Props do go out to actually making an arcade and taking pictures.  Again, if I wanted crap like this, I’d read theonion.

“Hulu Confidential” (Hulu) – Hulu exposes their “Alien Plot”.  While the video production is quality, and it is an interesting plot, this was 100% designed by their marketing department (and it shows).  This could have been released any day of the year and nobody would have known the difference.

(for more check out http://aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com/)

The Good Stuff

There were a few that I actually got a good chuckle at:

“4chan” (4chan) – They just tweeted about 4chan 2.0.  This was great — what a way to poke fun at the rest of the internet.  Everyone thinks that Facebook Connect is a key to unlocking additional content, which facilitates additional revenue, etc, etc.  4chan is proof that thriving communities can and do still exist in a way that doesn’t directly correlate to revenue, and all the web 2.0′s and tight integration with social networks is complete BS.  I love it.

“Admin For A Day” (reddit) – Reddit made it appear that there was a code glitch that allowed everyone to have admin rights.  This actually took some foresight and programming, and doesn’t appear to directly tie to traffic/revenue.  It’s just good old-fashioned fun.

“Command-line website” (xkcd) – Browsing the site through the command-line… absolutely brilliant.

If it weren’t for these 3 sites, my April Fools would have been a waste.  Thanks guys.

april fools, fun, stupid

Well, that time is upon us… time for April Fools.  I’m not very good at coming up with good pranks, but a friend of mine, Chris Alef, gave me a great idea: swap all the product images on Backcountry.com for pictures of our management, provided at http://www.backcountrycorp.com/corporate/section/0/aboutus_team.html.

Pretty simple, and funny idea, but how do you make it work?  It was a lot easier than I thought.  The first idea was to use a proxy, and route all traffic from the office through the proxy.  That seemed less than ideal — if the proxy went down, so would everyones web access.  Orders would stop shipping, buyers would stop buying, and I would be in a lot of trouble.  There had to be a less risky way to do it.  Well, our images (all static content I guess) are hosted on content.backcountry.com.  Limited to a single domain, eh?  We have an internal DNS, so if we could get content.backcountry.com to just be a proxy, changing only a few images, we could just update the dns to use the proxy.  Brilliant!

I started up an EC2 instance of Ubuntu, installed squid, and started configuring it.  I followed relatively the same pattern as the Upside-Down-Ternet, using a redirector.  In all, these are the configs I changed/used in /etc/squid/squid.conf:

redirect_children 20
http_access2 allow all
http_port 80 accel defaultsite=content.backcountry.com vport=80
cache_peer content.backcountry.com parent 80 0 no-query originserver

where content.backcountry.com is the origin server (what to proxy), and /tmp/test.pl is the redirector.  Without the redirector, this would be a completely transparent proxy to static content.  Now, the redirector code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
$|=1;
 
@images = (
  'http://www.backcountrycorp.com/images/newsletter/2131.jpg',
  'http://www.backcountrycorp.com/images/newsletter/2132.jpg',
  'http://www.backcountrycorp.com/images/newsletter/2133.jpg',
  'http://www.backcountrycorp.com/images/newsletter/2135.jpg',
  'http://www.backcountrycorp.com/images/newsletter/2129.jpg',
  'http://www.backcountrycorp.com/images/newsletter/2134.jpg',
  'http://www.backcountrycorp.com/images/newsletter/2130.jpg',
  'http://www.backcountrycorp.com/images/newsletter/2231.jpg',
);
 
while (<>) {
  my $tmp = $_;
  if ($tmp =~ /images\/items\/medium/) {
    print $images[int rand(scalar @images )] . "\n";
  }
  else {
    print $tmp;
  }
}

Restart squid, and done! Now just test it by updating your /etc/hosts to add the ip of the proxy and content.backcountry.com. Behold, the result:

Jill looks good, doesn't she?

I ended up not doing it. I really didn’t feel it was worth losing my job by messing up. If I could have found a better way to do it than updating the DNS, even the internal one, I would have done it. But it was just too risky at my company. Oh well, now you all know how to do it

fun, image, prank, proxy, squid