The worst Wongery blog post I ever made was ten years ago to the day, on April 1, 2013.
This is saying a lot, because in the early years of the Wongery I made a lot of embarrassingly bad blog posts. I'd seriously considered deleting at least some of those old blog posts and hiding my shame, but I decided I ought to face my folly and leave the posts up in all their inglory. Still, even in comparison to the other utterly asinine early blog posts, this post in particular took the cake.
(Yes, I know I didn't link to the post in question. That was on purpose. If you really want to read it, you can find it in the blog archives. But I'd advise against it. I'd advise against reading any of the Wongery blog posts prior to 2015. I'm still not sure I shouldn't have deleted them.)
The gist of the post in question was that given that the site had been up and publicly available for more than three months and had received no visitors, and given that our sporadic update schedule had highlighted just how unrealistic our goals were, we had decided that the Wongery was a failure, and were officially giving up on it. The domain registration was already paid through December, so the site wouldn't go down immediately, but there would be no further updates; the Wongery was dead.
And then the next day, I made another blog post revealing that the previous post had been an April Fools' Day joke, and that we had never had any intention of giving up on the Wongery.
Now, this was a very, very stupid April Fools' Day joke, for several reasons. For one of those reasons, we'd explicitly referred to April Fools' Day in the post. We'd even explicitly said that as nobody was visiting the site, it would be pointless to pull an April Fools' Day joke that no one would see. And, of course, we did just that. Now, I don't know what I was thinking at the time (presumably I wasn't), but at this remove pulling an April Fools' Day joke after explicitly saying that I wasn't going to pull an April Fools' Day joke seems... well, it seems like a really cheap trick, and kind of a betrayal of trust. It's like Lucy promising Charlie Brown that she's not going to pull the football away this time, or Janet assuring Michael that this time it's not a cactus, except worse, in that I'm doing it completely on purpose and to total strangers and also there are enough other differences that I'm not even sure those are good comparisons; sorry.
Except that I'm not really doing it to total strangers, because, as I explicitly noted in both the April 1 blog post and its April 2 followup that the site has no visitors so nobody saw the April Fools' post so I was in fact pulling this prank on precisely nobody. Which renders it completely pointless.
Except that if the site had had visitors and there had been people actually visiting the site and if anyone had fallen for the prank... well, actually, that would have been worse. The "prank" still would have been just as pointless—seriously, what would it accomplish to convince people the site was shutting down?—but it also would have been, well, kind of mean-spirited. It wasn't funny; it wasn't entertaining; it would have accomplished nothing and I would have been lying to people for no reason.
But really, that's what many, perhaps most, April Fools' Day jokes are. They're just lying to people for no reason. Sure, the perpetrator of the prank may get some amusement from his deception, and maybe so do others who weren't taken in by the joke and who take the opportunity to gloat at those who were, but overall I think they cause more negative feelings than positive. And that's why I want to promise that never again will I try to pull an April Fools' Day joke in a Wongery blog post. And that's not an April Fools' Day joke. And this time I mean it.
(Okay, maybe it's hard to convincingly convey that I'm not making an April Fools' Day joke when on a previous occasion I said I wasn't making an April Fools' Day joke even as I was making it, but, well, you'll note that last time I did reveal the joke the next day. If there is a blog post tomorrow, it will explicitly say that today's post was not an April Fools' Day joke, just to settle the matter. I mean, if it was an April Fools' Day joke, it would be a really bad one, but then so was the one I perpetrated in 2013.)
Now, that's not to say the Wongery won't do anything to commemorate April Fools' Day. Some sites on April Fools' Day, rather than try to fool readers with misleading information, just change the site for the day in some wacky way that obviously isn't intended to deceive. And sure, that can be fun. Maybe the Wongery will do something silly on April Fools' Day. Not this year, both because I don't really have the time and because, again, we currently don't have any visitors and it would be pointless, but maybe in the future. But the one thing we're not going to do (again) in the Wongery on April Fools' Day is just straight-up lie to you.
And once again glancing through old blog posts I find that this is a matter I already briefly addressed, in a post from May 31, 2015. Eh, well, that's all right; maybe it was worth reiterating. Anyway, happy April Fools' Day, and on this day fraught with mischief may your fun outweigh your frustration.