{"id":348,"date":"2006-04-01T20:16:45","date_gmt":"2006-04-02T03:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/blog\/?p=346"},"modified":"2006-04-01T20:16:45","modified_gmt":"2006-04-02T03:16:45","slug":"action-figures-sold-separately","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/2006\/04\/01\/action-figures-sold-separately\/","title":{"rendered":"Action figures sold separately."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was a bit confused if the WordPress dev blog was playing an April Fool&#8217;s joke with their <a title=\"Wordpress Dev Blog\" href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/development\/2006\/04\/wordpattern\/\">announcement of &#8220;Wordpattern&#8221;.<\/a>  Having read it over, I&#8217;m fairly convinced it&#8217;s a joke, but should note that I can tend to be unfortunately gullible, at times.  In any case, here are some items of humor I came across while researching this &#8220;hoax(?)&#8221;.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Our groundbreaking, no-nonsense approach of creating a fast and lean CMSMS (CMS management system) is unparalleled and will fulfill the need of <em>every<\/em> user out there \u2013 we won\u2019t be content with anything less.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>A &#8220;Content Management Software Management System&#8221;?  Awesome.<\/p>\n<p>The <a title=\"Wordpattern Features\" href=\"http:\/\/wordpattern.org\/features\">Wordpattern features page<\/a> has some choice tidbits:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>4 Minute Install<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The latest InstallMark\u2122 benchmarks clock the WordPattern install process in at 3:47 \u2013 that\u2019s a 25% improvement over WordPress 2.0, and a whopping 41% faster than Textpattern.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Gidgets<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Like widgets, only cuter.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I think this marks the first time a web application benchmarked its install speed.  I also like BJAX, Web2.1 (beta), and invisible URLs.  The <a title=\"More Wordpattern Fun\" href=\"http:\/\/wordpattern.org\/roadmap\">roadmap section<\/a> is not to be missed, detailing Wordpattern&#8217;s &#8220;5 milestones&#8221; (the 5th being World Domination).  I like the idea of &#8220;Tiger Teams&#8221;, as well as the Marketing and Evangelism Team.  Also linked from the roadmap is <a title=\"We do stuff.\" href=\"http:\/\/www.huhcorp.com\/\">Huhcorp<\/a>, who they&#8217;re evidently working with.  <a title=\"We do stuff.\" href=\"http:\/\/www.huhcorp.com\/\">Their page<\/a> is hilarious as well.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Our name will confuse you, but, you have to admit, the logo design is pretty cool. And we&#8217;re good at turning regular words into &#8220;e-words,&#8221; such as &#8220;e-consulting,&#8221; &#8220;e-business&#8221; or &#8220;e-sexual harassment.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Our office is really modern and we&#8217;ve got nice computers and stuff. If you ever saw it, you&#8217;d say &#8220;Wow, cool office. These guys are legit.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Following more links, to <a title=\"We do stuff.\" href=\"http:\/\/www.huhcorp.com\/ideas.htm\">Huhcorp&#8217;s &#8220;ideas&#8221; page<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Our female staff members are all hot, so, even if there&#8217;s nothing to meet about, we&#8217;ll sit and flirt with them, and charge you for the time. When one of our new-age marketing gurus or design experts or consultants has an idea, the rest of us look at him or her with serious expressions and write stuff down on paper.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m really temped to quote their entire site, because I find it all completely awesome, but you should just go and <a title=\"Huh?\" href=\"http:\/\/www.huhcorp.com\/strategies.htm\">check it out for yourself<\/a>.  The coup de grace of this Wordpattern Masquerade is on the legal page, where one finds the following:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>The Fine Print<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>All content, code, images, sounds, smells, ambience and the warm fuzzy feeling you get while basking in our glow are Copyright (Q) 1972-1976 The WordPattern Concern. WordPattern\u2122, the WordPattern Logo\u2122, the letters W\u2122 and P\u2122, the colours white\u2122 and black\u2122, and the non-breaking space\u2122 are registered trademarks. The WordPattern Concern does not represent the accuracy or reliability of the information on these so-called \u201cweb pages\u201d, after all you can\u2019t believe anything you read on the internets these days.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Things like this make <a title=\"Well-known hoaxes.\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/April_fool%27s_day#Well-known_hoaxes\">April Fool&#8217;s Day<\/a> worthwhile.  But on a more serious bent, why don&#8217;t companies make their &#8220;serious&#8221; web pages this interesting?  Would I want to use a company like Huh? for marketing by looking at their website?  Maybe, and maybe not, but they would certainly stand out from the crowd, and that&#8217;s never a bad thing.  Offering serious and quality information about your product is a good thing, certainly, but it can be oh so dull.  I would love to see companies manage to fit factual aspects into entertaining text.  I mean, when was the last time you READ through the entirety of a corporation&#8217;s site because it was <strong>entertaining<\/strong>?  Yeah, me neither.  If we&#8217;re going to start talking about aspects of Web 2.1 (beta), I think a defining feature should be humor.<\/p>\n<p>** <a title=\"Great Big Blog\" href=\"http:\/\/greatbigblog.com\/article\/950\/TextPress-or%2C-WordPattern%3F.html\">Mention of &#8220;Wordpattern&#8221;<\/a> dates back awhile, at least to January 2005.  It appears the original coinage of &#8220;Wordpattern&#8221; (and Textpress) belong to <a title=\"Jina Bolton\" href=\"http:\/\/jinabolton.com\/\">Jina Bolton<\/a>, though her post is lost to everything but Google&#8217;s cached pages.  Her post was in response to <a title=\"What's Your Poison?\" href=\"http:\/\/joshuaink.com\/blog\/129\/whats-your-poison\">this post on Joshuaink<\/a>.  Here&#8217;s <a title=\"We Keep EVERYTHING.  Forever.\" href=\"http:\/\/72.14.203.104\/search?q=cache:l0KX1kttAcsJ:jinabolton.com\/journal.php\/page\/7\/+wordpattern+jina&#38;hl=en&#38;gl=us&#38;ct=clnk&#38;cd=2\">Google&#8217;s cached version<\/a> (2nd post down) if you&#8217;d like to read it.  There, I&#8217;ve done my snooping for the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was a bit confused if the WordPress dev blog was playing an April Fool&#8217;s joke with their announcement of &#8220;Wordpattern&#8221;. Having read it over, I&#8217;m fairly convinced it&#8217;s a joke, but should note that I can tend to be unfortunately gullible, at times. In any case, here are some items of humor I came [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}