Ranting

  A person by the name of Craig Brandon Fisher was so bold as to steal my old old site design as well as copy almost completely verbatim lines of my BLOG and claim them as his own. I am not mad that he would take my html, but I am very annoyed that he would take them and claim them as his and in his html comments, say:

This site is the property of Craig Fisher
Don't even think about trying to steal it.
If you like some of my html or javascript code and
wish to reuse it, just send me a quick email.

  Compare his with mine.

  You will notice how cascading style sheets (css), comments, table formating, color choices, and links are all pretty much exactly the same. Please note, it is my old design so picture links and such are outdated and may not work. Oh, and it seems to display best on Internet Explorer.

  Here is my take on it all. HTML isn't sacred code or anything, the source is available to be viewed at all times. I could really care less if people were to take my source and improve upon it and make it their own. However, what was done was that:

1. All my code was taken with color attributes, css, background, logo, etc... without even an attempt to personalize the aesthetics of the page. Pretty much a direct rip of the art form/layout.
2. One of my web logs was completely plagiarized as a entry of his own. This is what I find is most annoying. Essentially, my thoughts and ideas for a particular moment (formatted into a short paragraph entry) was stolen and placed into a format which he called his own on his own page.
3. And most offensively is how he claims the html as his own and tries to protect it by asking people who likes his html source to send him an email, to properly ask permission to use his source!

  My final thoughts are that I don't advertise my style/layout as something everyone ought to use for their web log (blog). So if SOME of my style/layout is taken, I could really care less. Heck, I don't even want to be sourced or given recognition for stuff that I wrote. Because it's just HTML, and whether it's borrowed from me or someplace else, it's just that available for your viewing and learning pleasure. There are tons of places where I got my influences from which I would not and cannot give credit to because it's far too vast and just plain not worth it. I learned how to write table tags from viewing the sources of several sites and tinkering around with them. Through an accumulation of knowledge on html and my own artistic style (influenced by many many places), I built my school site up with the confidence of being able to say it's 100% mine.

  But there is a fine line between taking someone's work and building upon it, and just plain stealing. On Craig's page, I really do not see much of his works and ideas on it as I do see mine.

  **Note**: The above opinions are purely mine and does not necessarily reflect upon what Boston University or users of the Internet believe.