April Fools Site: Auto-Fading Text

Posted April 1, 2008, 12:02 a.m.

For April Fools Day 2008, the site faded away . . . 90 seconds after loading it each time. It appeared at the same time as my Website 20 launch, so I put them together to confuse people. The Website 20 launch message included this message:

I’m happy to announce that today, the first day of April, I have launched a major revision to my web site. Version 20 marks my shift from the Joomla content management system to WordPress. The most important new feature made possible by this switch is Auto-Fading Text, which encourages the reader to read my site quicker and more efficiently (and makes the text nearly illegible if they do not). Read on to learn more details about Auto-Fading Text and the other new features.

Auto-Fading Text: Auto-Fading Text is a new feature I’m developing in conjunction with the WordPress team to encourage blog and web site readers to read content faster and more efficiently. This cutting-edge technology slowly reduces the brightness of web site content over approx. 90 seconds until it is nearly illegible, making it necessary for the reader to speed-read or risk squinting and eye damage. Users who are slow readers may be required to refresh the page one or more times to finish content, which is annoying and further reinforces the need to read quickly.

Click to enter and see how it looked.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

One thing a computer can do that most humans can’t is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse.

Jack Handey

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Salman Rushdie

The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Having lots of ideas doesn’t mean you’re clever, any more than having lots of soldiers means you’re a good general.

Nicolas Chamfort

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.

Albert Einstein

A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

Edgar Allan Poe

They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer—not an easy answer—but simple.

Ronald Reagan

Christianity . . . divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all.

G.K. Chesterton

We who believe in strong defense are the true peace party.

Margaret Thatcher

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

Mary Wollstonecraft

It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.

Jordan Peterson

Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves.

Henry Ford

Those who oppose ‘corporate personhood’ should consider how difficult it will be to win a settlement against a company that you cannot sue because it is not a legal person.

Scott Bradford

Few people are . . . bold enough to apply [reason] relentlessly . . . to kings and ministers, to men in high places. And if we don’t, we’re doomed to remain mediocre.

Nicolas Chamfort

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Jesus Christ

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That’s the essence of inhumanity.

Bernard Shaw

Abstract verbalizations about personal liberty, freedom of the press, and so on, will not be convincing in most parts of the world. In many areas they will not even be comprehensible.

U.S. Office of Strategic Services

God commands us and sets limits for us not because he is out to make life difficult or to take away our fun. God commands because he loves us and does not want us to be trapped in the painful realities of sin and evil.

Charles Pope

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Nikola Tesla

There is nothing indulgent about the moral law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.

C.S. Lewis