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
- Comment Likes 
- Comment Dislikes
January 28, 2008 at 7:35 am
That is pretty funny, I bet a lotta people fell for that!
April 11, 2007 at 9:50 am
It was funny
April 6, 2007 at 7:09 am
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
April 6, 2007 at 7:07 am
Actually, just click on the last word in the third paragraph, and voilla. Theres the complete movie.
Enjoy
April 5, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Still Cool …!!
April 3, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Don’t you dare shut this blog down or there won’t be any more chocolate or cookies. You know who this is!
April 3, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Don’t you dare shut this blog down. I’ll stop bringing you chocolate and cookies.
April 3, 2007 at 5:00 am
i straight knew that it was an april fools prank. Who would throw away such a popular blog?
April 2, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Hmmm… I totally missed it.
April 2, 2007 at 1:04 pm
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.
April 2, 2007 at 7:10 am
I also missed out I was weekending in hell
April 2, 2007 at 4:05 am
I recognized the Lost theme instantly and I began laughing. 1st of April is always a crazy day.
April 2, 2007 at 4:04 am
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
.
April 2, 2007 at 3:42 am
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…
April 2, 2007 at 3:37 am
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.
April 2, 2007 at 3:25 am
nice april fools shoemoney!
April 1, 2007 at 10:06 pm
You are SO BAD!!!! I missed out because I read through the feed – my jaw would have hit China!
April 1, 2007 at 8:36 pm
I had to do a double take on the whole Cutts thing.
April 1, 2007 at 8:30 pm
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!
April 1, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I think google’s Fool tops them all
http://www.google.com/tisp/ (free in home wireless from your toilet 
*L* )
April 1, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Doubt it, lol
April 1, 2007 at 4:31 pm
You had me for a sec
…
APRIL FOOLS!
April 1, 2007 at 4:19 pm
You definetly had me thinging something wierd was up last night
April 1, 2007 at 3:40 pm
I actually got really scared and disappointed when I saw then. Then I looked at my calender, and ease set over me.
April 1, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Many people got tricked. Thought you got into trouble.
April 1, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Should you really have said that!?
April 1, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I didn’t see it until this post. Very funny though.
April 1, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Nice Little April Fools day trick man.
April 1, 2007 at 12:50 pm
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!
April 1, 2007 at 12:23 pm
It was the first thing I saw this morning – I thought it was pretty funny. I posted it on my blog toot sweet.
April 1, 2007 at 11:28 am
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.
April 1, 2007 at 11:14 am
Good trick man. Me on the other hand, I was hired by Google to be their official bouncy ball and Zorb tester.
April 1, 2007 at 10:19 am
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!
April 1, 2007 at 10:19 am
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.
April 1, 2007 at 8:35 am
Hoho.. It was a nice one though.
I guess some people did get tricked!
April 1, 2007 at 8:34 am
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.
April 1, 2007 at 8:22 am
You didn’t list Google’s April Fools’ page! Free broadband from the WC
April 1, 2007 at 8:14 am
Thanks, I just saw that after I posted the comment.
April 1, 2007 at 8:07 am
cool little april fools script.
April 1, 2007 at 6:10 am
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
April 1, 2007 at 5:15 am
Apart from the April’s fool this code is quite nice if you really need to send a message to readers.
April 1, 2007 at 4:38 am
I knew something wasn’t right. I had no problems entering your site through Google, which I found very odd.
April 1, 2007 at 4:16 am
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.
April 1, 2007 at 3:06 am
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!
April 1, 2007 at 1:10 am
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.
April 1, 2007 at 12:49 am
I knew something was going on =)
March 31, 2007 at 11:57 pm
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.
March 31, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Shoe mentions others in the blog and Matt was one
March 31, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Got a lot of people. WF ppl seemed to figure it out quick.
March 31, 2007 at 11:06 pm
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 ….
March 31, 2007 at 10:58 pm
You got me bad. I searched Google to see what happened to Shoemoney. Apparently, nothing
Good one.
March 31, 2007 at 10:36 pm
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
March 31, 2007 at 10:13 pm
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/
March 31, 2007 at 10:09 pm
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!
March 31, 2007 at 9:37 pm
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!
March 31, 2007 at 9:35 pm
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.
March 31, 2007 at 9:26 pm
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…