Theme Adoption

August 20, 2004

It’s evi­dent that Michael Heile­mann of Binary Bon­sai received enough emails in regards to his site’s theme that he decided to release Kubrick. On a sim­i­lar note, I’ve been receiv­ing a few emails in regards to using the kartooner.com “theme” for other per­sonal projects.

At first I was a bit sur­prised that any­one would want to use this design. I sup­pose it’s the per­fec­tion­ist in me, but I’m not 100% sat­is­fied with the look of this site. Granted, it’s my best lay­out yet for kartooner.com, but to me it’s just another lay­out under con­stant scrutiny. It seems like every­day that I’m tweak­ing var­i­ous aspects of this site, whether it be stylesheet or graphic oriented.

In my attempt to pre­vent con­stant redesigns I’ve set­tled on this theme for the time being. Yet, I can’t guar­an­tee myself or my read­ers that I won’t change this design in the next 6 months. One of the great aspects of a per­sonal web site is the free­dom to exper­i­ment with fresh layouts.

If you’re a well-known designer with a blog, like Dave Shea or Jef­frey Zeld­man, you might face an onslaught of dis­grun­tled com­ments, but smaller sites like mine with only a hand­ful of read­ers rarely receive any neg­a­tive or pos­i­tive feed­back on redesigns. When we do, how­ever, it’s like receiv­ing a response from the Dali Lama. Let’s be hon­est, it’s always nice to receive pos­i­tive feed­back and con­struc­tive crit­i­cism but neg­a­tive feed­back? That’s like receiv­ing a slap in the face in most cases.

That said, I guess what I’m get­ting at is this: Should I let other inter­ested Word­Press blog­gers adopt this site’s theme, if proper credit is given? Maybe I should apply for a Cre­ative Com­mons license to retain my copy­right, but allow copy and dis­tri­b­u­tion on the grounds that credit is prop­erly dis­played. How­ever, what is the process in track­ing legit­i­mate and ille­git­i­mate uses of your work? 

12 comments

[…] ;s a brave man to take on the inevitable sup­port bur­den, but has borne it extremely well. Erik Sagen has also con­tem­plated releas­ing his design — but that hasn’t happen […]

by Gary Shewan :: gpshewandotcom » Design availability on September 12, 2004 at 11:14 pm. Reply #

It’s a damn good design and there will surely be a lot of peo­ple that will want to use it. But Michael has been run­ning around try­ing to solve bugs (which I knew he would come up against once he decided to include plu­g­ins) and his band­width has prob­a­bly rocketed…now the move to Matt’s server.

S’pose the other thing to think about is would you like ‘X’ num­ber of sites pop­ping up that look exactly the same as yours?

Regard­less, there would be a want for it once word got out.

by Gary on August 20, 2004 at 11:08 am. Reply #

Gary: I’m not sure how I would feel about ‘X’ num­ber of sites using this theme.

For one, this is a Fire­fox com­pat­i­ble theme and breaks in some areas (com­ments and side­bar head­ings) in IE thanks to CSS dis­play issues. This would require a bit of re-coding on my end that I would need to find the time for.

I’m set­ting aside some time in the future to blow out the stylesheet for this design and re-work it from the ground up (same design, dif­fer­ent stylesheet), but would this fix the glar­ing IE issues, who knows?

by kartooner on August 20, 2004 at 11:16 am. Reply #

I know exactly where you are com­ing from, espe­cially with con­stant changes :D My CSS is a mess, and with 10mins and a cup of cof­fee whilst pour­ing over the source I can just about remem­ber what I did and where.

There’s no way any­body else would be able to just plug it in and get it work­ing, and I wouldn’t be inclined to fix it so they could. Besides, I sweated blood and (almost) tears of frus­tra­tion to get the damn thing working…best way to learn!

Hmm, I mustn’t be in a very char­i­ta­ble mood today ;)

by Gary on August 20, 2004 at 11:24 am. Reply #

In regards to the ‘keep­ing it under con­trol’, I’ve just decided to more or less let it go. Which is why Kubrick is so sim­i­lar to my own layout.

I’ve seen peo­ple adopt things from BB that I didn’t orig­i­nally intend for oth­ers to ‘use’, but by now I’ve sort of con­verted into more of an open source idea of my designs. If peo­ple want to use notions from BB, then that’s great, I don’t mind it at all. I’ll redesign at some point anyway.

As for bugs in Kubrick, they’re mostly non-related to plu­g­ins. In gen­eral they deal mostly with many dif­fer­ent peo­ple hav­ing many dif­fer­ent ways of set­ting up their servers, and me try­ing to fig­ure out how to make it easy for every­one to use.

v1.2.4 is by the way bugfree right at the moment as far as I know :D

by Michael on August 20, 2004 at 11:43 am. Reply #

You’re too good to peo­ple Michael ;) I think I men­tioned on your site as well that I wouldn’t have included plu­g­ins or any­thing else — just the design — but that’s just me.

Look­ing for­ward to the gallery to see how peo­ple are using your design though.

by Gary on August 20, 2004 at 11:53 am. Reply #

Michael: Thanks for the insight. I’m sure you’re up to your neck in bug reports and tech­ni­cal sup­port (all of which you pro­vide on your free time) which you should be com­mended for. When you opted to release your BB theme I must admit that I thought it was both a bril­liant plan (to let oth­ers use your work) and some­thing that could inevitably turn into a nightmare.

I’d imag­ine it’s a toss up for you. Since releas­ing Kubrick you’ve increased your recog­ni­tion (you were cool before, but now you’re an instant blog celebrity) but it also increases band­width, etc.

Again, I think it’s great you’re doing this for peo­ple but I’m sure you’ve had days of com­plete burnout. I’m not sure if I’m ready to open the floodgates.

by kartooner on August 20, 2004 at 11:55 am. Reply #

I was going to put together a cou­ple of css, index com­bos for peo­ple to down­load and use as a giv­ing back to the word­press com­mu­nity type of thing, but I wasn’t really going to release my own. There are some lay­outs that aren’t really cov­ered by what’s out there right now, so it seems like we should get a few more that cover dif­fer­ent scenarios.

As for licens­ing, you should license it under cre­ative com­mons, even if you intend to not reserve any rights at all, which I believe is what i’ll end up doing. Cre­ative com­mons just makes it clear exactly which rights, if any, come into play.

by Christian on August 20, 2004 at 1:46 pm. Reply #

Plan­tilla para WP: Kubrick, de Michael Heile­mann
Michael Heile­mann ha puesto (post) a disposici?n de la comu­nidad las plan­til­las de su bit?cora para Word­Press, que en…

by Word Press en espa?ol on August 20, 2004 at 3:49 pm. Reply #

I for one like your design and think its great. My rec­om­men­da­tion would be to cre­ate a “request” form on your web­site or via email where is one wanted to use it they could request it. In the request require them to pro­vide a link of where they will be using it. Then you could at least know some­what were its being used.

by Jacob on August 22, 2004 at 9:18 am. Reply #

Jacob: Good idea. Too bad it will work entirely on the honor sys­tem. Jon Hicks seems to find his work being pla­garized all over the place.

by kartooner on August 22, 2004 at 2:25 pm. Reply #

[…] Viernes, 20 de Agosto 2004 / 20:37 H — en: Weblogs V?a Kar­tooner. Descarga de plan­tilla para Word­Press a cargo de Michael Heile­mann. Sen­cilla y f?cil de instalar. […]

by Blog Desarrollo Ideasapiens » Plantilla para WordPress: Kubrick v1.2.4 on September 30, 2005 at 7:31 pm. Reply #

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