Welcome to the re-design. This is the final design. The real one.

Trust me.

I’ll go into more detail about all this on a separate page. I have made the occasional smartass post at Feral Living, a hoax or two, nothing big, just small stuff like The Wino Scandal, The Shoe Project, or The 100% Miguel Test. Most recently in this same vein there has been the “If The Kilt-Lift on MouseOver Doesn’t Work Try Reloading” hoax, which did result in more page loads. One visitor, for example, racked up 20 page views in 6 minutes.

The Great Opinebovine Design Theft Hoax was slightly different than those.

Look, it was all D.’s idea. I really, really wish that I could take credit for this one, but D. thought of it. He was kind enough to offer to do a new design for Feral Living. We were discussing possible jokes to combine with the move, and he suggested this. Elise was nice enough to give her permission. [I would like to mention that I have been a great admirer of hers since I began reading blogs back in the days of Swallowing Tacks.]

Knowing how suspicious my readers have become, we figured it would get a couple laughs, and if we were lucky someone would fall for it and leave a nasty comment. After Elise was kind enough to link Feral Living (for the third time in a single month!) I also suspected traffic would increase for a while.

We thought Feral Living might make it onto Blogdex, from everyone updating their links to reflect the new URL (the old site is still at http://feralliving.blogspot.com; it will be left up indefinitely for the sake of the archives and the Shoe Project, at least until a new home is found for them). We did not suspect that The Great Opinebovine Design Theft Hoax would reach #7 on the daypop top 40, #9 at blogdex and, ultimately, be featured at pirated-sites.com, making it an official internet scandal.

All that wasn’t bad for traffic either. Here is a screenshot of Feral Living’s statistics (visits and page views) for the month of December up to the 22nd (careful, all screenshots are over 100KB). The first spike resulted from the 100% Miguel Test hoax, the second is the Opinebovine Design Theft Scandal.

Here are some more screenshots: Feral Living on Blogdex. Daypop Top 40. Pirated-Sites.com. Opinebovine. Fake Feral Living design.

A word about this design, the real one: I am thrilled with it. D. is brilliant, a great artist and designer and a real funny person. It’s an inspiration and a wonderful Christmas present. Working with him is great fun, and I must repeat my warmest and most sincere thanks to him and to Ann for all their help.

I would also like to thank Elise for her support of this project. Elise rocks. She is really, really cool. But you know that already. Thanks also to kd for hosting Feral Living at surreally.com. She is cool as well and also rocks. Go there now if you haven’t already. Finally, thanks to everyone who played along, thanks to every one who linked and commented, and most of all, thanks to those few of you who fell for it.

Happy Holidays. God bless us everyone.