Konami Code Plus Newsweek Equals Zombies!
- Thread starter vansau
- Start date
Another corporate idiot passes on free web traffic. I might have actually gone to Newsweek.com for the first time in my life if they had kept it.
Holy crap! I'm on Escapist!
So hi, I'm Mike. I'm a front end developer at Newsweek, and I created the zombie code.
So here's some quick insight for my fellow gamers. The zombie code was created during the Newsweek redesign period. The result of one too many late nights, a healthy l4d addiction, and the desire to have developer credits led to it's implementation. You may notice that all of the "authors" are either developers, designers, or project managers mentioned in the Newsweek masthead.
The code was -never- intended to go viral (but hey, can't control that). It was also unsanctioned by Newsweek. Most of the higher ups only heard about it once other news outlets started covering it. I noticed when my TweetDeck exploded, and our homepage went from a typical 3,000 pageviews an hour up to, at it's peak, 75,000.
That's actually a big part of why I'm not fired. The zombie content was harmless, and I made sure to remove any photos (copyright issues) and author names (don't associate authors with pranks...trust me!). It drove massive amounts of traffic to our homepage and garnered lots of media attention (my favorite, apart from Escapist, is being on NPR morning edition). There was a big push from the Internet attuned crowd here to keep the code up. I would say 80% of the company thought it was great, both personally and professionally. Sadly, once the executives were aware of the code they had a professional responsibility to take it down or face the wrath of -their- bosses (Jon Meacham, Fareed Zakeria, and the Washington Post).
I don't really blame them, it's tough times.
For anyone who missed it, the content isn't gone, just commented out. You can still read it by searching for "adDebugContent" in http://www.newsweek.com/etc/designs/newsweek/lib.js
Also, here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/s1zCc
What can I say, no one ever wants to deal with ad code.
So hi, I'm Mike. I'm a front end developer at Newsweek, and I created the zombie code.
So here's some quick insight for my fellow gamers. The zombie code was created during the Newsweek redesign period. The result of one too many late nights, a healthy l4d addiction, and the desire to have developer credits led to it's implementation. You may notice that all of the "authors" are either developers, designers, or project managers mentioned in the Newsweek masthead.
The code was -never- intended to go viral (but hey, can't control that). It was also unsanctioned by Newsweek. Most of the higher ups only heard about it once other news outlets started covering it. I noticed when my TweetDeck exploded, and our homepage went from a typical 3,000 pageviews an hour up to, at it's peak, 75,000.
That's actually a big part of why I'm not fired. The zombie content was harmless, and I made sure to remove any photos (copyright issues) and author names (don't associate authors with pranks...trust me!). It drove massive amounts of traffic to our homepage and garnered lots of media attention (my favorite, apart from Escapist, is being on NPR morning edition). There was a big push from the Internet attuned crowd here to keep the code up. I would say 80% of the company thought it was great, both personally and professionally. Sadly, once the executives were aware of the code they had a professional responsibility to take it down or face the wrath of -their- bosses (Jon Meacham, Fareed Zakeria, and the Washington Post).
I don't really blame them, it's tough times.
For anyone who missed it, the content isn't gone, just commented out. You can still read it by searching for "adDebugContent" in http://www.newsweek.com/etc/designs/newsweek/lib.js
Also, here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/s1zCc
What can I say, no one ever wants to deal with ad code.