Mirror Life
Published 21 years, 6 months pastEver have the feeling that you’ve seen a site somewhere before? It happens to me on occasion, and this morning e-mail hit my Inbox pointing me to the Web site for The Clasby Family, which looks darned familiar. In case something changes, here’s a screenshot of the site, and a shot of a similar one. Actually, all but one of its themes look really familiar for some odd reason.
How did I find out about this? Someone e-mailed me to mention that the designer for clasbylife.com had posted a forum question about Opera’s rendering of the themes. I read the post and was amused to find it was the exact same problem I hit back in February, and explained the situation in some detail in a site post. So it turns out the source of the problematic styles is also the source of the explanation. Funny!
For the record, I’m not really upset by this, although it would have been nice if I’d been asked about the use of the images, since some of them are my original works (those in “Natural” in particular). One really good way to learn CSS-driven design is to snag a local copy of someone else’s design and take it apart. Then put it back together in your own way. clasbylife.com seems to have that underway, with a new theme that looks to be a mutation of “Natural.” If grabbing a copy of something I’ve done help a designer understand CSS a little better, then I’ll be the last to complain. More power to you. Feel free to use them yourself, as long as they’re used for non-profit or educational purposes. No charging other people for my designs, though! I really have to get around to explicitly branding these things with a Creative Commons license so it’s all clear.
Anyway, as the new stylesheets note in fairly obvious comments, some of the images I use belong to me, whereas some came from other sources. That won’t stop people from copying them, but at least I’m providing fair warning (and credit).