First, read what this gentleman has to say about the appropriation of content from other weblogs:
I was reading Dawnkeyotie’s blog and she links to the story of Tequila Mockingbird and how some young punk wannbe blogger has been stealing her material.
Now I’ll admit to being influenced by other sites, like my About This Site page borrows rather heavily from the About page at Ani Moller’s site, but stealing word for word… Just not cool.
Etiquette is the name of the game… If you want to use text, at least give proper credit, or a trackback if possible.
If you want to steal my life, go ahead, I dare you… I Double Dog Dare You™ Mofo! I may not display a copyright notice, but it’s in the source of every page on this site.
Now, with that firmly in mind, head on over and check out his site design.
Look familiar? It looks awfully familiar to me. Funny, there’s no credit given, and he’s replaced the copyright notice in my code with one of his own, implying that the design work is his.
According to his about page, the last major redesign to his site went live on Monday, Feb. 2nd of 2004. Checking his archives, here’s what we find for the redesign announcement…
You like?
I though I’d lost this new look, but luckily a few files were still on my server so for the last 12 hours I went through everything with the virtual equivalent of a fine tooth comb and cleaned it all up and finally finished what I started some 2 weeks ago.
I think it’s much nicer, but then anything is much nicer than the old b2 default template, so it makes this place my own at last.
Before you ask, yes, it looks a bit unaligned in Internet Explorer, but it looks great in Mozilla Firebird and seeing as that’s the browser I use mostly, get used to it. If I can find a way to realign in IE I will, but until then it’s just cosmetic differences.
Yes — he definitely made this place his own — as long as “his own” is rather loosely defined as “blatantly stolen from someone else”.
Sigh.
The really ridiculous thing about this, though, is that I actually do like the way my design translates to a two-column layout. Considering I occasionally toy with the idea of going back to a two-column design rather than this single-column design, if I used the same base overall look, I’d end up looking nearly exactly how he does now. Would I then have to turn around and give him credit for inspiring some of the design?
Again — oh, the irony.
(Many thanks to Firas for the tip-off.)
Update: All’s well that ends well.