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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

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24 July 2003

Anyone recognise the design of this site? It reminds me of something, but I can’t quite place it. This was discovered courtesy of an interesting looking blog I can’t read. Can anyone translate?

Unrelated, look what comes up when you go to Google and search for find a guy. Google adjusts its results constantly, but at the time of writing, this site is coming up as the number 1 result.

(Can you tell I’ve been searching through my referrer logs?)

- Drew McLellan

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  1. § tarantulz: translation:
    Where have I seen this (saved)? I wondered and I wondered... And remembered! I have seen it here (saved)!

    nothing special actually, kinda violated copyright notice :)
  2. § Drew: Thanks! Sorry to sound ignorant, but which language is it in?
  3. § sm: latvian :P
  4. § Drew: Wow, I didn’t even realise Latvia had its own language. That’s too cool. (Also shows that I’m an idiot).
  5. § skalpelis: Now THAT sounded somewhat ignorant :)
  6. § Drew: As I say, I’m an idiot :)

    But at least now I’m an idiot who has learned something.
  7. § Drew: Cool site to read more about Latvia: http://www.lv/. (Latvia’s beautiful)
  8. § zlog: Drew: That guy is asking some very good questions though;

    ”Where is the matrix?”

    -http://www.raksta.lv/index.php?s=eng

    ;)
  9. § Lonnie: I would think you would be flattered to have your great design copied. I know I would. But my designs suck rocks.
  10. § Drew: Lonnie - you’re right, it is a form of flattery. However, there’s right ways and wrong ways of going about it.

    Case it point: plasticbag.org takes its design routes from kottke.org, but Tom went about it in the right way. He added his own creative ideas and moved the design to something that was his own. He also credits the original, and I’m sure he would have spoken to Jason about it first. The result is two great looking sites, not one design with two different sets of content.
  11. § Nathan Pitman: Errr... if you use the ’browse’ drop down on the left it translates for you. ;)

    http://www.raksta.lv/index.php?s=eng
  12. § Nathan Pitman: Oh, your talkin about the blog you linked to ’HomoLupus’ from, I see. Sorry, yet again I submit a comment before engaging my brain. sorry! :)
  13. § skalpelis: Actually, the ”eng” in the dropdown just lists the articles that are in English. As far as I know, the one about the Matrix is the only one.
  14. § jason hoffman: But it’s not a similar design that takes its ”routes” or inspiration from you site: it’s the same design.

    I think the difference here is that you do this for a living, and have a vested interest in the design of your site.

    His only defense would be ignorance and if a guy also does this for a living then that can’t really be a defense either. You can put a notice on your html and css source (like csszengarden’s notice) in order to educate the ignorant but a notice isn’t legally required in any country that adheres to the Berne Convention (including Latvia).

    There is also a consequence to mentioning this in a public way and then doing nothing about it, and that is that you have now licensed your design to this individual. I could even take it now and argue that you’re ”giving it away”. This is why there is generally a knee-jerk reaction to put someone on notice when they’ve violating a patent, trademark or copyright.
  15. § christina weisbard: Hey! For an entertaining spin when you need to avert your eyes from work, you can always see who else has been ripped off over here.

    http://www.pirated-sites.com/

    ’mazing that people don’t even feign changing the code, no?
  16. § christina weisbard: OK. Let’s try that link again.
    http://www.pirated-sites.com
  17. § HomoLupus: I stand up and proudly say that I’m Sorry.
    In fact the design similarities were created because I was just playing with css and found out that allinthehead has really nice design I wanted to be able to replicate and textpattern’s default templates sorta encouraged this. And it wasn’t intented to become the main design - once I finished I liked it and put it live.
    I’m sorry for all the incoviences I may have caused (looks like this little experiment have become one of widest discussions about me worldwide ;D).
    Whoopsie...
  18. § Drew: Thanks, HomoLupus. I see you’ve taken the site down. No hard feelings.
    :-)

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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