April Fools' Joke? Not here.

Over the past couple of days, I had tried to successfully come up with something that would make a great hyalineskies April Fools’ Joke. Some ideas that crossed my mind were:

• Think Pink I considered releasing my new design for hyalineskies which existed solely in analogous shades of garish pink. Of course, I would set the body copy in Comic Sans and all of my headlines would be SIFRed to Zapfino.
• Spruce Goose I considered saying I had finished Fuselage, my WordPress framework, early, and then proceed to link to a 1GB download (of purely random data.) Due to bandwidth concerns (and the thought of how unfunny this actually is) I decided against this one, too.
• MySpace Emigration My last thought was to redirect hyalineskies readers to a MySpace blog as my new home. This would be equally stupid, although the idea of having a 9Rules Network MySpace blog would’ve been fairly amusing.

However, one thing I certainly never considered doing was taking down hyalineskies in its entirety and replacing it with a rather ominous note. This is exactly what happened to fellow 9rules Network Member Bryan Veloso and his beloved Avalonstar some days ago, after the site had mysteriously gone down with an HTTP 500 a while prior. In fact, ever since something occurred shortly after SXSW, no one from 9rules or otherwise has seemingly been able to contact Mr. Veloso, and, unfortunately, one of the coolest members of and best designers in the blogosphere has mysteriously gone absolutely dark.

This was, at least for me, the last straw in an expanding dramatic disaster that has occurred with blogs I actually care about in the past week. While Sierra and Holzschlag’s issues have been of concern to me, Bryan is actually someone I have talked to in more than just blog comments, and his active stance in working to improve both the 9rules community as well as the tech community as a whole (Come on, more people definitely need to have fun events and “unconferences”) has really hit a little too close to home. I’ll be the first to say that the blogosphere has been an absolute mess lately and Veloso’s issues are only a small part of a bigger disaster.

With all of that said, however, there will be no April Fool’s jokes here. We are left in too serious of a state right now to be amused by silly Internet premises. When the blogs of awesome people cause problems in their personal lives, it is imperative that those who are unaffected stop and show some solidarity. It is time for us to be serious, regardless of whatever national holiday or other folly just so happens to fall within the same timeframe. We are a bunch of nutty bloggers. We can joke another time. We can joke around when our own colleagues and friends are happy, safe, and communicative. We can joke around when we are all together. We can joke around when we overcome the dilemmas we are now faced with.

Now is not the time for silly jokes. While the Internet is certainly not “serious business,” the well-being of those we do care for to any degree whatsoever is more serious than anything I could ever write here.

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