Let me tell you a story. This morning I was happily checking my new referrer logs when I came across a link to somebody’s personal page. I thought maybe they had linked to me so I fired up my browser to check it out. The site was the usual crappy Angelfire teenager personal page, but the design looked a bit familiar. In fact, it looked exactly like my friend Brigita’s site. EXACTLY. This person had copied her entire design, right down to claiming Brigita’s personality test statistics as her own. She even kept Brigita’s StorTroopers and relabelled them as herself and her boyfriend. Needless to say, this pissed me off. Not only was she ripping off my friend, but the StorTroopers were being hosted at my site – as a favor for Brigita – and thus my own precious bandwidth was being sucked away. (And y’all know how I get about that.) So I calmly sent this little fiend a letter, explaining that we were on to her and I’d appreciate it if she’d kill the image from my site. I didn’t get any answer, so I went back to the site tonight to see if she’d complied. What I saw was not pretty.

Am I being a bitch here? I really don’t think so. You’ll note that there’s no mention of the bandwidth issue… basically because there’s no excuse. As for her defense of “copying” – I wish I’d taken a screenshot so you could compare the sites. There’s a difference between viewing somebody’s source code (and maybe grabbing a few of their ideas) and co-opting somebody’s entire look & feel. Hell, I incorporate elements from practically every website I read here at web-goddess. I’m a big fan of that. I’m not a big fan of simply saving somebody elses HTML (images and all!) and calling it your own. I feel bad that this girl feels her “work” has been wasted, but given the disregard she showed for Brigita’s property, it’s her own fault. What do you think? Leave me your comments.

Hooray! My domain nameservers have finally been updated and they should be propagating down to your own ISPs as we speak. (Actually, if you can read this, you’re already soaking in it.) And check out my fancy-pants new design! It’s not a huge change, but I like it. There’s a poll in the works too that will slot nicely into that column on the left… just as soon as I can figure out MYSQL.

Just checking my referrers for more disturbing search requests (today’s was “giant breasts UK“) and came across a new ‘blog that links to me: NIMISIS. So I thought I’d return the favor.

Huge apologies for the extended delay, everyone. I think I mentioned that I was having problems with my host, Portland. (Note: If you’re thinking of hosting a site there, don’t.) After numerous outages and problems, I decided to pony up for a real ISP. So I sent off a request to Portland to transfer my domain and then headed off to Scotland for the weekend. When I got back last Monday, I discovered that Portland had cancelled my account, thus rendering me unable to update the site any further. On top of that, they didn’t get to my transfer request for over a week. In summation, Portland sucks ass. Big time. My new host should hopefully be much more stable and there won’t be any bandwidth restrictions or long download times.