Another Fine April Fools’ Day: Thanks for the Fun

April 1 holds a special place for us here at TechWhirl, it’s the day we took ownership of this amazing property–back in 2011. It’s also one of the special days of the year that speaks to the offbeat sense of humor of the owners. We did our first April Fools’ Day celebration in 2012, and were delighted with the response from our participants and our readers.  We thought it would be hard to top the Valley Girl translation of the Microsoft Manual of Style, or HelpRobo 9, but we were, er… foolishly mistaken.

Thanks especially to the members of the technical communication community, vendors, and TechWhirl sponsors who shared the laughs with us:  Adobe Systems and Parth, Saibal and Maxwell; WebWorks ePublisher and Christopher Ward; STC and staffer Kevin Cuddihy and all the leaders and members who tweeted; Scriptorium Publishing and Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle; TechWhirl Special Writers Unit members Yehoshua Paul and Cheryl Voloshin who did some admirable “investigative journalism”; and especially to XML Press and Richard Hamilton who went above and beyond in due diligence and humor.

We are also indebted to Sloppy Joe, Neoklis Demitriou, Q, Z, Josh Freeman, Dewey Lyman, Julie Neumar, Alicia Florick, Will McAvoy, and Mackenzie McHale for their inadvertent contributions. And thanks to all who voted in the SME cooperation poll included in Yehoshua’s article. It got as many votes as some of our “serious” poll questions.

In case you missed any of yesterday’s broken news, here’s the roundup: