April Fools 2021 on my projects

As most big-name companies abandon April Fools - I wanted to have some fun of my own with new projects made after April 2020. Here’s some of the April Fools that I played on users of my websites!

DOCBatch

Because DOCBatch is unofficial by nature, a guaranteed April Fools was to fake it being shut down by Dine On Campus. Opening up DOCBatch on 4/1 greets you with this storyline:

This storyline is triggered once on 4/1 only, and can only be triggered again by clearing site data (I store a value in local storage to indicate if the april fool was played)

And the Clippy part is very real!

Clippy.JS (the library used to add Clippy) has lots of options to interface with Clippy, including animate, speak, reposition, etc. I had a quick hack so that on mobile phones Clippy would properly put itself in the right place.

Every 15 seconds, clippy will animate. It’s also attached to event handlers (DOCBatch 3 not being spaghetti paid off here!), so it’ll get your attention if something fails (with corresponding text), or become a checkmark when something works.

One friend enjoyed Clippy so much that I’ve decided to make it an option in settings once April Fools is over.

WebWork Status

Given it’s a status page, the April Fool was in the making - just reverse the statuses! So I did just that.

How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room?

For How Hot, I decided to have a slight sensor malfunction by adding certain numbers to datapoints after April 1, 12:00 AM.

Everything is done client side, all actual data is preserved on the server side. I also increased it in logical numbers, so it’s still easy to get the actual data (for instance, temperature is increased by 100F).

That’s all the April Fools I did! I decided not to do anything with track.easterbunny.cc since April Fools was extremely close to the liftoff date for 2021.

Hopefully you enjoyed your April Fools!