{"id":1897,"date":"2003-10-30T14:31:36","date_gmt":"2003-10-31T06:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/10\/30\/people-must-like-my-design\/"},"modified":"2019-12-06T10:21:48","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T18:21:48","slug":"people-must-like-my-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/10\/30\/people-must-like-my-design\/","title":{"rendered":"People must like my design"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:12968,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.interalia.org\\\/archives\\\/002042.php&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>One of the many things that I&#8217;ve enjoyed about the numerous comments I&#8217;ve received over the past few days is that I&#8217;ve gotten quite a few compliments on my site design. As I&#8217;m generally not much of a designer (trust me on this one &#8212; my previous attempts were not horrid, but certainly not great), that&#8217;s always a nice compliment to get.<\/p>\n<p>However, there is a potential downside to this that I hadn&#8217;t foreseen &#8212; that being people ripping off your site design.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/graphics\/2003\/10\/ripoff.jpg\" title=\"The top of the page\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"The top of the page\" src=\"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/graphics\/2003\/10\/ripoff-thumb.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"134\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/graphics\/2003\/10\/ripoff2.jpg\" title=\"The bottom of the page\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"The bottom of the page\" src=\"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/graphics\/2003\/10\/ripoff2-thumb.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"134\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Even better (or worse, depending on how you look at it) is how I found out. Normally, things like this aren&#8217;t always easy to spot. I found out simply because as I was looking through my referrer logs, I noticed a link that I hadn&#8217;t seen before &#8212; not uncommon over the past couple days &#8212; only it didn&#8217;t seem to be pointing to one of my pages. Instead, it appeared to be pointing to itself. Odd.<\/p>\n<p>So I bounced over to take a look. Imagine my surprise when I found my very own site design staring me in the face! I was not at all happy. Then I pulled up the source code for the site &#8212; and started laughing. Just to give you an idea:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The title of the page is still &#8216;eclecticism&#8217;.<\/li>\n<li>The <code>meta<\/code> tags still hold all of my information: this site&#8217;s tagline, RSS feed, and FOAF file.<\/li>\n<li>The code has been mangled by Microsoft FrontPage 5.0 &#8212; always the hallmark of a top-notch site designer. ;)<\/li>\n<li>The trackback RDF data for my posts is still in the page.<\/li>\n<li>While the images in the &#8220;ad banner&#8221; at the bottom of the page have been replaced, the <code>title<\/code> arguments are still the same.<\/li>\n<li>It still has the TypePad statistics tracking code at the bottom of the page (which is why it showed up in my referrer logs).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The best part of all of those, though, was that he&#8217;d not altered the CSS stylesheet at all &#8212; so he was hotlinking the banner image of the Seattle skyline that I use (while it was displaying on his site, he was still pulling it off of my images directory here on TypePad)!<\/p>\n<p>So, in an effort to be polite, I searched around the site for an e-mail contact link so that I could ask him to take my design down. Unfortunately, he hasn&#8217;t provided one. So I&#8217;ve been forced to resort to slightly more drastic means.<\/p>\n<p>A quick recode of my stylesheet to replace my banner image here on this site with an identical one, so that it won&#8217;t be disturbed, and a little bit of quick and dirty Photoshop work on the image that he&#8217;s linking to, and instead of my skyline graphic, he now has a banner proudly displaying to the world that ~~his site design was stolen from me~~.<\/p>\n<p>Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. But this &#8212; this was just clumsy, stupid, and poorly executed. I hope he finds another design soon. Just watch your referrer logs &#8212; his next design just might be yours!<\/p>\n<p>(In addition to my screenshots, Phil has provided .pdf screencaptures <a href=\"http:\/\/www.interalia.org\/archives\/002042.php\" title=\"Design Jacking Whores\">on his site<\/a> &#8212; thanks!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is a potential downside to a good site design that I hadn&#8217;t foreseen &mdash; that being people ripping it off. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2040],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-1897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-website"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}