Over on ManagingCommunities.com, I’ve detailed the April Fools’ Day pranks that we pulled this year on the iFroggy Network.

April Fools’ Day affords many website owners with the opportunity to have a little fun with their visitors and I am not one to pass that up. So, just like last year, some of my site’s played host to a prank in honor of the day.

All meant in good fun. I hope you had a fun day, as well. What were your favorite pranks this year? Please let me know in the comments.

April Fools’ Day is always a fun time for me and that is reflected on the iFroggy Network, where I collaborate with my staff and others to brainstorm ways to have fun with our visitors on April 1. Here’s what we did this year:

On KarateForums.com, all logged in members were granted admin panel access, via a link in the header. The link took them to this page, encouraging them to prank others by talking about their new found admin access.

On phpBBHacks.com, we announced that phpBB 2 support was coming to an end on the site. But, this is not the case.

At PhotoshopForums.com, we announced plans to support only Photoshop CS4. Basically, if you asked a question on the community, it would have to relate to Photoshop CS4 and no prior versions. If you created a graphic or example and posted it on the forums, it would have to have been created with CS4. That’s not something we are going to do.

Finally, on Bad Boy Blog, we did a couple of jokes. When I was coming up with ideas, I had been thinking of fun story ideas that I could write about. One of them was “Exclusive: Sources: Jordan McCoy Joins Boyz N Da Hood, Replacing Gorilla Zoe.”

For those who don’t know, Jordan McCoy and Boyz N Da Hood are both acts signed to Bad Boy Records. McCoy is a 17 year old pop/rock singer who is also a member of Dream, which is a pop girl group. Boyz N Da Hood is a southern, hard core rap group consisting of rappers Big Gee (signed to Bad Boy as a solo artist, as well), Big Duke and Gorilla Zoe (also signed to Bad Boy). Jody Breeze is another member, but his status is up in the air and it sounds like he’s out.

So, really, what I was going for here was some Onion style humor. Something that is rather obviously absurd, but written in a serious, believable manner. Jordan and her manager, Debbie Hammond, are friends of Bad Boy Blog, so I decided to see if we could make it bigger by involving them.

We didn’t have a lot of time, but we pulled something together. First, I posted my report late on March 31. Then, in the afternoon on April 1, her MySpace layout was updated to include “The Newest Member of Boyz N Da Hood!” in the header (see it here). She blogged about it on MySpace and jordanmccoy.com and tweeted about it. I then wrote a post, announcing her confirmation of my report.

So, we collaborated to pull off a pretty good joke and gave her fans a laugh. After I announced it was a prank, she did the same and her MySpace layout was reverted to it’s normal form.

The other joke we did at Bad Boy Blog was to supposedly post a new single from Diddy. While it sounded believable, anyone who clicked the audio player link in the post was taken to a page announcing the prank.

Another April Fools’ Day in the books!

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to a pair of conferences in Greensboro, North Carolina. I have now made some headway into my to do pile, so I wanted to take some time to write up a recap while it was still relatively fresh in my mind. What follows is my personal recap of ConvergeSouth 2008 (October 17) and the Independent Blogging Conference at Greensboro (October 18).

Thursday

I drove from my home in Harbinger, North Carolina to Greensboro and it took me about five hours and fifteen minutes, with two stops along the way. My friend Jared Smith, driving in from Charleston, South Carolina, arrived just 10 minutes after I did.

There were two big things that hooked me into coming to these conferences in the first place. The first one was that my friend Jonathan Bailey of PlagiarismTodaywas speaking at ConvergeSouth. But, the other reason was Jared. When I was thinking about the conference, knowing he was within striking range travel wise, I reached out to see if he would be interested in going. Undecided, I kind of helped push him to attend, I guess you could say.

I’ve known Jared for about eight years now. We met through phpBBHacks.com, when he came to the site and became a member of my staff, from very early on in the site’s history. He saw a lot of the … fun challenges that working in the phpBB community afforded us, helping me to tackle them. He was always by my side and we developed a close friendship from that point forward. But, we’d never met in person. It was awesome to be able to do so and a ton of fun to hang out with him for a few days.

ConvergeSouth had official dinners starting at 7 on Thursday, one of which I was scheduled to attend. With Jared headed to one and me to another, we didn’t really have much time to chat before we had to get ready and separate. I went to the one at Table 16. Anil Dash was supposed to be hosting it, but he had a flight change and ended up being unable to do so (he actually ended up coming to the dinner that Jared was at, in a strange twist).

Sometimes, people, companies, websites, groups, etc. are given a great, great opportunity. Maybe it was some hard work and a lot of luck, but they are given a great opportunity. I was just talking about one such group with my friend Jared. I came up with a quote to describe what happened to this group. “Opportunity knocked and they shot him.” Or, if you prefer, “Opportunity knocked and they shot her.” Whichever. :) As of right now, there are no Google results for this exact phrase, so I thought I’d write a post as Jared felt it Tweet worthy.