April Fool's Day 2008
Yesterday was April Fool's Day. On the whole, I didn't see too many really funny gags. My favorite was the Dog to Unicorn Transformation Kit, though a close second was an email from the Electronic Frontier Foundation announcing that the administrator account credentials for the Wikileaks website had been published to Wikileaks. The irony of that made me laugh out loud.
As usual, I procrastinated until the absolute last minute on my own April Fool's joke. With help from the gang in #habari on irc.freenode.net, we quickly put together a website for the first annual HabariCon conference. It was fun to post blog entries to that site in an attempt to make it at least plausible that this really had been in the works for some months, though I don't think any of us had any expectation that we'd actually fool anyone. (Though we were sufficiently convincing to at least make people think twice!) Special kudos to miklb for the site themes, and so many of the graphics! Thanks also to Caius and Arthus for sponsor logos.
We set up a Twitter account for HabariCon, and the group in #habari made a point to post to Twitter throughout the day to keep up the ruse. I think it was probably more fun for us to do than for anyone to watch. :) The presentations were particularly fun to brainstorm, as we made a specific point to prepare sessions that were absolutely antithetical to the Habari community model we espouse.
In the process, I registered the iPony.org domain name for our fictitious Platinum Sponsor, and am now left wondering what I'll do with it. I'm sure something will come to me.
I expect I'll leave the HabariCon and iPony sites online for a few more days before making archive snapshots of them. We do hope to have an official HabariCon at some point in the future, but the official domain for that endeavour will be at .org, and not .com.
You *have* to do something with iPony.org. If nothing else, put some photos of Grow a Pony on there!
I will tell you that at first, I was all upset that there was a HabariCon (something I would love to attend, not just for good company, but to learn about Habari and get my blog switched over.), but then I realized it was being promoted just a little too much. :)
Last year's Forkpress had me going for days though :)
I was disappointed to find that HabariCon was powered by Habari. It would have been hysterical if the footer of the page said "Powered by Wordpress".
Don't worry, Jennifer: I'll make use of iPony eventually! ;)
Rick: that very idea was presented early Tuesday morning, but at that point it was way too late to move all the content. :) Plus, it would've been an even bigger give-away of the joke! We wanted to have at least some ambiguity about the conference.