Carl Tyler's Blog

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Many out there got it straight away with either an eagle eye or good anagram skills, but then there were others that fell for it hook line and sinker. I received a few emails similar to this:

Hi There ,
As an avid football fan I was extremely surprised and disappointed to read that the live TV matches will be delayed by fifteen minutes. In my opinion the spoils the very excitement of the game . The sort of thing we a trying to cover against happens so infrequently that I cant really see the point of doing it. It also seems that this is down to the preference of the united states, A nation whose interest in football is questionable to say the least.
Yours in disguist

which was sent to media@vvorldcup.com

So what was the deal, well it was my April Fools joke. I delivered it a little early because April 1st fell on Saturday and blog readership is low on Saturdays. Does anyone know which year the WorldCup falls on the same year as April 1st landing on a Monday? Anyway I had a few ideas for possible stories, "1st woman to play in WorldCup", "WorldCup TV coverage cancelled due to failed union negotiations", "Wales given WorldCup reprieve because of drugged up Russian squad", you get the idea, so how did I do it?

Well you may remember a while back I had mentioned that I got the Domain name v v orldcup, because when written out in the right font it looks like worldcup.com. I decided this domain was the perfect vehicle to deploy my April 1st attack.

First thing I did was to take the official worldcup.com site and save it as HTML, nothing fancy just save the pure HTML. Then I put it on my server to see how it looked. It looked OK, but the Flashmedia was pointing to wrong places and the links were all relative. Simple fix for both problems was to just add a BASE HREF in the head of the HTML. This mean that the page was now server up by my server but the pictures, movies and links all worked. Now all I had to do was write the news story and replace the text in the page and Voila, a fake Worldcup page.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed it and don't think I'm too evil...