Thief

Monday, 8:16 am

By Kate

Since I’ve had a weblog, these past 4 years or so, I’ve only banned one person from my site. Last night I banned him again.

This past December I received an e-mail from a guy who gushed at length over one of my site designs. And then he asked, “Can I have it?” I mulled that request over for a few hours. Too long in his opinion, apparently—he attempted to jog my memory by hitting my site in excess of 1200 times that same night. And then followed up with several more e-mails, pressuring me to give him the templates for my site. When I didn’t respond, he employed a little site grabber utility and sucked everything he could find out of my site. The only thing he couldn’t get was the CSS template for the design. I banned him immediately. That design (Blue Linen) was the one I entered in the ExpressionEngine design contest.

Shortly after the contest ended, he contacted me again and asked for the design again. I pointed him to the ExpressionEngine template site. And that was the last I heard from him.

Until last night.

He wrote:

Hi Kate,

Another beautiful site.

And not without shame, I’m writing to ask if I can view the source for the site. About six months ago, I wrote you and requested the source for your Blue Linen site and you graciously sent it to me (provided a link). I’m wondering if you can do the same with this?

I know this is an audacious request from a stranger, but consider me a fan and what they say about imitation.

Since the e-mail was a few hours old by the time I read it, I checked to see if he’d already hit my site a few hundred times to, you know, jog my memory.

Well no. He didn’t. As you can see in this pop-up image from my StatCounter he decided to simply take the templates, twenty minutes later, using a Macintosh utility called SiteSucker. So I banned him. Again.

Now, I don’t know what prompts an individual to think it’s okay to download someone else’s site, images included. And I don’t even know what prompts an individual to expect site owners to just hand over their entire site to be duplicated elsewhere. That just amazes me. In all the years I’ve had a web site, he is the only person who has not only asked, but expected compliance. Say nothing of harassing me about it when I don’t immediately respond. The thing is, I’m not even sure he has a site. He said he was working on one, but in all the e-mail that I’ve ever received from him, there has never been a URL to his site. And, I discovered, I’m not the first person he’s approached.

So get a clue, if you find your way back in here, Paul. No, you may not have my source code. I have always been perfectly happy to help people learn how to put a site together and how to solve problems. But unless otherwise stated, my site and its design are mine, Mine, MINE!