If you are visiting this site on April 1st, you may have deduced from the entry page that in the spirit of Picasa, Keyhole, and Blogger; notMike.com has become part of the Google empire. Yes, the Google execs were so impressed by the immense revenue potential of this site ($33.43 in Q1 Amazon Associates earnings, baby), they immediately extended a lucrative buyout offer that this humble starving artist could not refuse. ;-)
I learned a few things while creating this parody design. The official Google font is Catull by Berthold Types Limited. Also, I deployed my first real PHP script since David Sklar came and taught a couple dozen of my colleagues all about PHP. I used an elegant little PHP stylesheet switcher that I found on A List Apart. Hopefully, I didn’t break anything on my site.
This was a really quick and dirty hack. If you peek at the source code, you will see that both the real version and the Google version load on the same page [no longer applicable]. The style switcher just shows and hides the appropriate divs. Unfortunately, you won’t “get lucky” if you click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (welcome to my life), it just functions the same as the “NotMike Search” button.
April 2 Update: In case you missed it, or just want to see it again, here is an archive of the Google-skinned version of the site (minus the PHP style switcher).
I love it! It through me off at first :)
that was so cool!
Thank you, thank you, both!
I hope that it wasn’t too confusing or surprising for my visitors (no spit-takes I hope). ;-)
When I got the idea, I ended up staying up most of that night to put it together. I like so much how it turned out that I may keep it up for an extra day and then link the dummy version to my archives.
Okay, that was cool. I thought I’d gone back to google. Staring at the screen…wtf? Anyways, hi.