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April Fools Day Fun – ShoeMoney Station Closes

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



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Comments

  1. Tutorial Zone

    That is pretty funny, I bet a lotta people fell for that!

  2. TeamTutorials

    It was funny

  3. John Loch

    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 :)

  4. John Loch

    Actually, just click on the last word in the third paragraph, and voilla. Theres the complete movie.

    Enjoy :)

  5. John

    Still Cool …!!

  6. Susan

    Don’t you dare shut this blog down or there won’t be any more chocolate or cookies. You know who this is!

  7. Susan

    Don’t you dare shut this blog down. I’ll stop bringing you chocolate and cookies.

  8. Ashwin

    i straight knew that it was an april fools prank. Who would throw away such a popular blog?

  9. fivecentnickel.com

    Hmmm… I totally missed it.

  10. Bulbboy

    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.

  11. Amanda

    I also missed out I was weekending in hell :(

  12. geegel

    I recognized the Lost theme instantly and I began laughing. 1st of April is always a crazy day.

  13. geegel

    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 :) .

  14. DanyO

    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…

  15. DanyO

    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.

  16. KidBlogger

    nice april fools shoemoney!

  17. Wendy Piersall

    You are SO BAD!!!! I missed out because I read through the feed – my jaw would have hit China! :)

  18. Chad Ledford

    I had to do a double take on the whole Cutts thing.

  19. jim

    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!

  20. CPA Affiliates

    I think google’s Fool tops them all :) http://www.google.com/tisp/ (free in home wireless from your toilet :) *L* )

  21. Stuart Hannig

    Doubt it, lol

  22. Stuart Hannig

    You had me for a sec

    APRIL FOOLS!

  23. Nathan Hannig

    You definetly had me thinging something wierd was up last night

  24. thesobering

    I actually got really scared and disappointed when I saw then. Then I looked at my calender, and ease set over me. :P

  25. Gray

    Many people got tricked. Thought you got into trouble.

  26. Jeremy

    Should you really have said that!?

  27. Jeremy

    I didn’t see it until this post. Very funny though.

  28. CPA Affiliates

    Nice Little April Fools day trick man.

  29. Casey

    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!

  30. David Paul Robinson

    It was the first thing I saw this morning – I thought it was pretty funny. I posted it on my blog toot sweet.

  31. Christoph

    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.

  32. Ali

    Good trick man. Me on the other hand, I was hired by Google to be their official bouncy ball and Zorb tester.

  33. blairski

    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! ;)

  34. Greg G.

    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. ;)

  35. lyndonmaxewell

    Hoho.. It was a nice one though. :D I guess some people did get tricked!

  36. Maki

    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.

  37. Chris

    You didn’t list Google’s April Fools’ page! Free broadband from the WC :P

  38. drew

    Thanks, I just saw that after I posted the comment.

  39. DanyO

    cool little april fools script.

  40. St. Maarten

    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

  41. Daniel

    Apart from the April’s fool this code is quite nice if you really need to send a message to readers.

  42. Tim Ukaj

    I knew something wasn’t right. I had no problems entering your site through Google, which I found very odd.

  43. Mubin

    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.

  44. Brian Heys

    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!

  45. Andrew

    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.

  46. Hip Hop

    I knew something was going on =)

  47. no one of consequence

    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.

  48. ToddW

    Shoe mentions others in the blog and Matt was one ;)

  49. ToddW

    Got a lot of people. WF ppl seemed to figure it out quick.

  50. soul-healer

    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 ….

  51. Bo Bang

    You got me bad. I searched Google to see what happened to Shoemoney. Apparently, nothing :)

    Good one.

  52. John Loch

    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 :)

  53. drew

    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/

  54. Thor Schrock

    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!

  55. Ferrarislave

    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! :)

  56. ShoeMoney

    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.

  57. Ferrarislave

    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…

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