April Fools!

April Fools! Notice something different about CamWorld today?

Again, again! (loads in another random template)

Permalink: https://camworld.org/fool.html

Contact Cam: Email

How Did I Do This? It was pretty simple actually. CamWorld’s content is stored in daily flat files that contain very basic amounts of HTML. Things like H2, and P tags. Using the existing HTML templates of each site, I simply used Apache’s XSSI include system to execute the content, and used a slightly-modified CSS file for each template that approximated the look-and-feel of the borrowed site’s design. I then found a simple Perl CGI script on the web that would randomly load an HTML file from a specified directory, in this case, every subdirectory within /fool. This also allows me to archive the April Fools joke without modifying my own index.html file at all.

Notes: Digging through the various code of some [unnamed, and not represented here] sites yesterday, I had to simply give up on trying to drop my content into their templates. Some of this code was really bad and overly-complex.

Thanks: to Dori, Robert, Dack, Dan, David, Rafe, Jason, and Zeldman whose code I borrowed without permission to do this April Fools joke.

P.S. All graphic design, HTML and CSS code is copyright their respective authors. Please forgive any broken links…

Latest Microsoft Security Flaw: It’s not HTML-email that’s the problem here, it’s how Microsoft has implemented it. Tying email, the OS, and the HTML rendering engine together at this level is ripe for security flaws. Come to think of it, most Microsoft security problems seem to stem from their attempts to integrate software into the operating system.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at April 1, 2001 08:10 PM

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