Happy April Fools' Day

By Waldo Jaquith

In nearly five years of nancies.org's existence, not once have we pulled an April Fools' prank. Every year DMB fans try, of course, though few ever get off the ground. Nobody ever wants to put enough work into them to do anything interesting, and so they're consequently not at all convincing.

This year, that changed.

About a week ago, the over-worked, all-volunteer staff of nancies.org decided to do April Fools' Day right. It was determined that assembling a spoof fan site in place of nancies.org would be best, and musician John Mayer was quickly chosen as the man of choice.

Mayer, for those who are not familiar with him, is a musician that is often compared to Dave Matthews; many fans of Dave Matthews Band deride him as a saccharine bubble-gum wanna-be Dave Matthews. Of course, Mayer has a great deal of of fans in the DMB community, too, and the result is that the mere mention of his name is enough to send DMB fans into a death-spiral of spiteful exchanges.

We approached Bryan Hargrave, who runs The John Mayer Trading Page, and Veronica Varos, of This Desire, another John Mayer website. Each of them graciously allowed us to borrow portions of their site's contents for the purpose of April Fools' Day. Using the raw materials from each website, we spent the weekend of the 29th-30th writing a templating engine, assembling the graphics, inventing a plausible layout, and converting all of existing content's HTML into code that our crude templating engine would understand. After about six hours of work, a site with several hundred pages was in place, containing everything from a discography to lyrics, complete setlist archives for 2002 to a FAQ. Not a single detail was left untouched, from the fanboy-quirks that make fan sites what they are (the text "your body is a wonderland...I hope you know that" embedded in the fine print at the bottom of the page) to jabs at Dave Matthews Band ("Producer John Alagia worked with Dave Matthews Band before discovering -- and preferring -- John Mayer"), a convincing-looking poll (we decided that 38% would think that the site's new focus was "Very Good") to a copyright page crediting Columbia Records and John Mayer for "portions of the site." The entire site was a completely legitimate John Mayer fan site. Everything was in place for a totally-convincing April Fools' Day prank.

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