Well, you'll see that the site's back to normal again. Yep, most of you realised pretty quickly, of course, that it's April 1st. And shame on the two of you who thought it was serious! (For those of you who missed it, the whole thing's archived here).
I've actually been working on this joke on and off for about 3 weeks to get it ready for today. I wanted to do something original that would top the glut of sites that do cheesy fake announcements/redesigns/legal takedowns. Dozens of graphics had to be created from scratch, photos taken and doctored to look genuine, and a ton of CGI scripting to get the site to behave like I wanted. This last week has been one of late nights to get everything ready in time. If just one detail hadn't been exactly right it could have ruined the whole thing. It wasn't until late last night that I was even sure I was going to make it in time, when I finally nailed the cause of a bug in IE that was stopping the fake webcam feed from streaming properly. And of course that's not really me in the video... (I only wish I could do that) I went through frame by frame and where the guy's face is in shot and clearly visible (actually only about 40 frames in the whole 90-odd seconds, though I halved the framerate so I only had to change 20), I replaced it with mine. That was the hardest thing to do, but I think the result looks pretty convincing.
I'm glad the response was so positive, it justifies spending the time preparing the prank, and on top of that I also learned a ton about AJAX scripting and video editing. I already know what I'm doing for next year's April Fool's Day and I think it might even top this year's. Can't wait!
ho, ho, ho.
forbidden!
Can you fix it so that I can see? I read this (and all my other blogs) via rss, so I missed the silliness completely!
That was brilliant though. You should have left it like that. Was it flash you used to get the nav-bar to do that mad thing, cos when I right clicked on it it just siad save background image... Layers?