This was last year's idea for next year, meaning this year.

Yesterday I had the idea that I would try to convince every blogger to make her site unavailable for one day, April 1.

Every year people go out their way to construct bogus stories (did you check your Gmail today?) to have fun with the rest of us. But I thought it would be more fun if all the bloggers chose not to participate. To not post. To not feed. To just ignore it all.

But then I forgot about my great idea until after lunch. And then I turned off my blog for a couple of hours. I went to the Settings and made it restricted to just me:

Your blog is restricted so that only you can read it.
Other visitors to this blog will not be able to read any posts; instead they will get a message stating that this is a private blog.

Now, it's just this blog, so no one noticed (well, one person noticed). But it still looked interesting that whoever visited saw the message, "This blog is open to invited readers only." It would be cooler if it said, "This blog is closed today. Sorry for any inconvenience."

So like I said, maybe next year we'll do this. I would love to see a news story about thousands of blogs taking the day off. Think about it. Tell your friends.