Goodbye Omaha (April Fools 2013)

This year I decided to pull a tiny April fools joke. I decided this at four in the afternoon, on the day of, so I didn't have time to prepare.

I cashed in on John Henry Müller's recent departure from the Omaha area to pretend I was leaving too.

I quickly threw up a page on my blog that would redirect to a Rick Roll, then I realized that various Twitter clients follow HTTP redirects and unwrap links to get the "real" URL and page title. I've been burned by that before, so I changed my tactic slightly to move the redirect into JavaScript. That let me put a sliver of believable content onto the page so that Facebook shares would work too.

Finally, I tweeted it out, and started trapping suckers!

I didn't get Google Analytics on immediately, so I might have missed some folks, but I got 30 uniques on it that day from Facebook and Twitter.

Not bad at all. SPN even wrote about it!