Open Mouth, Insert...

Where Can You Take People These Days?

The ability for your average human being to transform into a cliff-jumping lemming never ceases to amaze me. For those of you who haven't been following along, or are new to the site, here's the situation. Yesterday, I took the old design I made for this blog, dressed it up for use as a template, called it OMI Ripped (I should have gone for a better name, but it's too late now) and sent it off to BlogSkins, where I have a small collection of templates.

Today, I checked into the site to see how Ripped is doing. An 4.0 rating out of 5 and 10 downloads already. Not a bad start. But then I looked at the comments. One of the regular readers here (hey, Francey!) made the appropriately snide comment "gee, this looks familiar! ;P" before moving on to give her thoughts on the design. Now, without the sarcasm, mentioning that a skin looks "familiar" is local slang for "plagiarized". Apparently the sarcasm didn't take, since the next three commenters hammered me on my seeming plagiarism (though happily they did not rate the skin), even though I explicitly stated it was the design of this blog not five days ago! Ripped is certainly a "used" skin, but it was definitely not plagiarized from another source.

So, if you are coming here from BlogSkins, I want you to remember one thing before you rate or comment on another skin: please, please read the author's comments for the skin before you look at it or the general comments, as it makes clear (at least I try to anyway) what I intended with the skin and where it came from.

I'm thinking that calling it "Ripped" was a bad idea...

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