At about 1:30pm or so I made the frontpage of shoemoney.com look like this. Course if you hit refresh you never saw the April fools day page.
Why did I do it on March 31? Well technically it was already April 1st in some parts of the world and also… if you wait until April 1st everyone already smells a rat! BTW don’t feel silly if I got you. I received literally 40 emails and instant messages from people who thought I got hacked or that my site was down. Most forums figured out it was a joke because of my love of the TV show LOST and also pondered how I did it just making the root site (shoemoney.com) and also only showing it once.
Here is the code I used for my wordpress site. Just edit the index.php if you want to play around. I also added comments so you could see what was doing what. As you can see if you are requesting any file other then the root domain of shoemoney.com it does normal wordpress stuff. Also it checks to make sure you have not seen the april fools day site before. If you have not seen it yet it then spits out f.html which I linked to above.
#Check if request is for doc root and also if its been cookied
if (($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']=="/") && ($_COOKIE['donethat'] == false))
{
#set cookie if its not
setcookie('donethat','true',time()+2629743 );#show april fools html
readfile ("f.html");
}
else
{#if the person has already seen it or is not requesting / then show them normal wordpress
/* Short and sweet */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');}
?>
Some other April Fools Day sites :
TechCrunch Has Acquired FuckedCompany.com
Matt Cutts – Hacked
Pirate Bay Hosting In North Korea
WordPress Developer Creates ForkPress
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2691 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Jeremy "ShoeMoney" Schoemaker is the founder & CEO of the ShoeMoney Blog, Elite Retreat Internet Conference, & the PAR Program. In 2013 Jeremy released his #1 Amazon Best selling Autobiography titled "Nothing's Changed But My Change" - The ShoeMoney Story. Jeremy currently lives in Lincoln Nebraska with his wife and 2 daughters.
How 2 Split Tests Made Me Over $93,000 
I Am A Recovering Addict of MMORPG Games 
Conference Travel Survival Guide 
.jpg)
{ 59 comments… read them below or add one }
The first thing that came to mind was wow not again. But then I thought hmmm seems odd a Unix security expert would let some script kiddies deface his blog one more time. So I refreshed a few times and tried */2007…
hah you would be suprised how low this blog is on my list of updating (security wise) I would not be surprised myself to see it get hacked again.
Yeah, I understand. I have a few forums that are the same way. I try to make it a habit to update once I receive the update reminder via email, but then again if you have backups and all it’s not hard to recover from a deface.
Cheers for the April fools joke!
The first thing that entered into my mind was LINKSPAM
That post got you a few links on technorati though. even though I read your blog daily, I heard about it there first!
It looks like Matt Cutts was “hacked” too:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
And Shchoeoe, I mean ShoeMoney was mentioned too:
http://int2e.com/blog/matt-cuttss-blog-has-been-hacked/
Yeah yeah. Sweet.
Looks like I got snowed.
I seriously thought he’d been hacked. Funny.
I thought I’d seen that symbol somewhere, but with the logo in the middle it reeked script kiddie with Photoshop.
Happy April fools SHOE you LABRAT ! Ya got me
You got me bad. I searched Google to see what happened to Shoemoney. Apparently, nothing
Good one.
i just woked and see shoemoney site closed … i see the foundation page and thought how come hacker be so polite to give a foundation link rather then his own … then i thought to use some old post link to check wether database still exists or not …. and i came to know it is april fool ……
and thanks for the code share ….
Got a lot of people. WF ppl seemed to figure it out quick.
Shoe mentions others in the blog and Matt was one
That’s a nice viral marketing site your fake page links to.
When the letter from Hanso comes up, put your mouse over the right hand side of paragraph that starts “Our methods must change…” That makes a buzzing noise start and then a few seconds into it you can hear someone talking about a virus. I haven’t listened to indepth yet and I’m just starting to look at the code.
I knew something was going on =)
For a minute I thought you lost it shoe. Im not a lost fan, so the hanso foundation thing had me totally confused thinking you gave up your money making ways for greater enlightenment.
Well, you got me. I was totally convinced you’d been hacked. I’m quite new to your blog, so didn’t know you’d been hacked before. Congrats – I’m a fool!
I always go straight to DigitalPoint to find out whats up, whether it be with adsense or shoemoney, theres always someone thats more obsessed than you.
I knew something wasn’t right. I had no problems entering your site through Google, which I found very odd.
Apart from the April’s fool this code is quite nice if you really need to send a message to readers.
Whoooooo man you really got me. My heart skipped a beat. I was like what-da-ya-mean Shut down. I almost got nervous then i typed the url to the serps tool and saw that there. Then tried back and found out you were just being a smart ass. YEH… good one shoe
cool little april fools script.
Thanks, I just saw that after I posted the comment.
You didn’t list Google’s April Fools’ page! Free broadband from the WC
The ShoeMoney Station page was sweet.. it should be made into a T Shirt..
Matt’s prank was really awesome as well. TechCrunch was a little too serious, which was funny in a way.
Hoho.. It was a nice one though.
I guess some people did get tricked!
On a somewhat related note, how awesome was last week’s episode of Lost? I totally thought they were going to wake up before the dirt went on. That was a good April Fools joke.
you ba&^%%D!!!!!!!!!! I had just finished blogging about the Matt Cutts and Shoemoney blog attack when I discovered your site was back. But I did say that it *might* be an april fools joke, so I don’t have too much egg on my face!
Good trick man. Me on the other hand, I was hired by Google to be their official bouncy ball and Zorb tester.
Looks more like a lack of inspiration to do a real April Fools joke. So, next year we can expect a joke on March 30th or what? Neither you or your servers are in a time zone that had already reached April 1st.
It was the first thing I saw this morning – I thought it was pretty funny. I posted it on my blog toot sweet.
I really thought the others had gotten to you! Good joke, I did the ol’ print screen image as a background and then hid the desktop icons. My buddy couldn’t figure it out for about 45 mins haha!
Nice Little April Fools day trick man.
I didn’t see it until this post. Very funny though.
Should you really have said that!?
Many people got tricked. Thought you got into trouble.
I actually got really scared and disappointed when I saw then. Then I looked at my calender, and ease set over me.
You definetly had me thinging something wierd was up last night
You had me for a sec
…
APRIL FOOLS!
Doubt it, lol
I think google’s Fool tops them all
http://www.google.com/tisp/ (free in home wireless from your toilet 
*L* )
That’s awesome, I think anyone who knows your love for Lost would recognize the reference but you never know… maybe it was a bad guy who loves Lost and hates you.
you never know!
I had to do a double take on the whole Cutts thing.
You are SO BAD!!!! I missed out because I read through the feed – my jaw would have hit China!
nice april fools shoemoney!
they also had the paper archive in gmail. Google usualy has several pranks for April Fools. Nice to see even though they’ve grown up, they still have a sense of humor.
Has anyone put up an April’s Fool archive yet? It would be neat to see a list of popular sites running april’s fool jokes, and see how they evolve…
The Hanso Foundation page was hilarious. I knew that you liked Lost. What I didn’t know was that you liked it THAT much. Welcome to the club
.
I recognized the Lost theme instantly and I began laughing. 1st of April is always a crazy day.
I also missed out I was weekending in hell
Matt’s blog is back to normal, but thinking about it now, wouldn’t April Fool’s be the perfect time for pranksters to hack a site.
With some sites pretending to be hacked, a lot of people would think it was just another April fool and not inform some webmasters.
Just a thought.
Hmmm… I totally missed it.
i straight knew that it was an april fools prank. Who would throw away such a popular blog?
Don’t you dare shut this blog down. I’ll stop bringing you chocolate and cookies.
Don’t you dare shut this blog down or there won’t be any more chocolate or cookies. You know who this is!
Still Cool …!!
Actually, just click on the last word in the third paragraph, and voilla. Theres the complete movie.
Enjoy
Actually Shoe, I was (god forbid) on a PC at the time with a tight version of IE7. I ws sure I had reloaded that damn page and it turns out I did. It was the first thing I did.
For some reason, the cookie was being blocked by IE. Might be worth a thought next time you explore the cookie tin
It was funny
That is pretty funny, I bet a lotta people fell for that!
Have you ever considered writing an ebook or guest authoring on other blogs?
I have a blog based upon on the same topics you discuss and
would love to have you share some stories/information.
I know my subscribers would appreciate your work.
If you’re even remotely interested, feel free to shoot me an e-mail.
Howdy, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar
one and i was just curious if you get a lot of spam remarks?
If so how do you protect against it, any plugin or anything you can suggest?
I get so much lately it’s driving me mad so any help is very much appreciated.