Ongoing developments

First of all, a hearty welcome back to all my continuous visitors and those who come. Sorry for the inconvenience caused by the server moment last weekend. I decided it was time to move-away from Dreamhost with this site, as the server-load by 1,000s of people pounding at the server’s doors at the same was causing endless Internal Server Errors (500). This, as dreamhost told me, is when the server daemon has to shutdown the apache process (respectively mysql) for a short time.

Then I would like to take the time to thank everyone who has been checking out my theme challenge and my created themes this July. A big thanks also to those who use them and the people leaving comments here.
Yet, due to the very good weather (kind of worldwide) and other circumstances I need to announce the theme challange a failure. Under these conditions I cannot live up to my goal of creating 30 unique themes this month.
I enjoyed creating the eight themes so far and it has been somewhat of a creative challenge. Also I noticed that one can always learn something new. Many of my themes got 1,000+ downloads, still there are people in need of laundering dirt at me. Is it really worth it? Spending so much time on nothing but trouble? I could as well be chilling in the boiling sun :)

I am one of those people that speak out their opinion, without a doubt often biased, but at least I do it with my name and do not try to masquerade my identity. I work for free, spent numerous of hours on designing and coding stuff for the community, yet I am quoted as one of the major “assholes” by certain people. They claim ‘I should not be raising my concerns while I am one of the guys abusing the system’.
What does this mean precisely?
Well, I do not like sponsored links, I think they are the plague. The arguments against sponsored links are widely documented on different websites and taking in to consideration recent developments (Wordpress Matt), there is nothing to be explained here.
Now those people that earn money by taking EXISTING designs, adding some CSS here and there (if at all) and then selling them to marketeers for 50-100$ / each link, are pretty damn pissed off. I can understand that, I would be pissed, too if I was not a student, but a full-time link-selling foul-mouth piece of monkeyfunk and now suddenly I see my easy earned money flowing away. I am sure there are new grounds to be found guys, don’t be sad (no crying baby this time)

Look at this sample case, which I have slightly alienated:
Designer dude one designs a really great layout,
he releases it for free, under no specific license.
The scamforce comes along, “oh wait, boy, neado, what a great layout”
It is not yet ported to Wordpress, what a great business opportunity to convert some easy work into cash.
Seen. Thought. Done.
The theme gets ported over to Wordpress (skilled people can do that under 4 hours).
Advertisers are contacted and/or Advertisers contact scamforce.
The links are sold, some misc. crap thrown in, together with a peesy little link to the original author.
The theme gets released.
People download it, like it (good quality) and use it.
However the original author finds out, and states why his link is not the only one in the footer.

Here is a sample (real) reply.
I would like to quote on of those tossers that hide behind names such as “fancypantsoptions” or “funkymonk-musings” (different people):

fancypantsoptions and funkymonk-musings ported this theme to WordPress, with help from a few folks who request links.
If you want your credit link to be the only one in the footer, you need to port the theme yourself!

Back to the issue why I am the asshole, if you believe what those people write.
I added (small sized) 30 icons of my future themes to every of those themes I started to release as part of my self-set challenge (reported about it weeks ago). I wanted to see people what is coming up and what they can choose from, a kind of little-themeviewer. No line ever says “you are not allowed to remove those”, I specifically encourage users to remove those once they found other user for the area. Those who doubt it, check the html commentary.
Furthermore I have manually checked every site that has been using one of my themes and most of them have already added modifications to it AND REMOVED THEM ICONS automatically. I love it when a system works.
As soon as the themeviewer is back up, I am going to upload fixed versions with no icons, no ‘crap loads of backlinks’ and a fixed feather theme with png fixes.

However, those people like to throw with what comes out of their back. It really looks like a distortion from their own pile of c… coconuts.

When I read articles like those from monkey1 and two, I really feel like throwing it all in a corner, it’s not worth it, is it?

Then also, I am being picked on for creating themes with ‘big fonts’ or layouts that do not validate.
Got anything worse?
Maybe I even sleep with my eyes closed. Now that is a no-no, too.
Laughing out loud. For a theme that is so shitty I wonder why it has so many downloads and so many people use it. Actually one fellow approached me with the IEXPLORE 6.0 PNG fix situation, and I already work on a solution, but as (now some statistics here), 40% of my visitors use Internet Explorer > 6.0, to be precisely only 24% of those 40% are lower than 6.0, I did not really pay attention. But hey, designing your own stuff is harder than porting. Instead of picking on me and using my full name in all your posts you could have written a mail or used one of the plenty contact possibilities on my site to quickly talk things over. It’s not nice.

You guys receive my “Thumbs down” for 2007. (Thumbs up for Mark&Matt)

But whatever you guys, just do your business and don’t mind mine.
I have not thrown-in your actual names at any occasion and you are really smart enough to hide behind domainsbyproxy.com, but I choose to be recognized and once and for all, I am Julian Klewes or jez, nothing else and if you like to quote me or have a problem, call or mail me. We can then sort it out.

A quick-png fix found on Google (first result, some ntl world site)

function correctPNG() // correctly handle PNG transparency in Win IE 5.5 & 6.
{
   var arVersion = navigator.appVersion.split("MSIE")
   var version = parseFloat(arVersion[1])
   if ((version >= 5.5) && (document.body.filters))
   {
      for(var i=0; i<document .images.length; i++)
      {
         var img = document.images[i]
         var imgName = img.src.toUpperCase()
         if (imgName.substring(imgName.length-3, imgName.length) == "PNG")
         {
            var imgID = (img.id) ? "id='" + img.id + "' " : ""
            var imgClass = (img.className) ? "class='" + img.className + "' " : ""
            var imgTitle = (img.title) ? "title='" + img.title + "' " : "title='" + img.alt + "' "
            var imgStyle = "display:inline-block;" + img.style.cssText
            if (img.align == "left") imgStyle = "float:left;" + imgStyle
            if (img.align == "right") imgStyle = "float:right;" + imgStyle
            if (img.parentElement.href) imgStyle = "cursor:hand;" + imgStyle
            var strNewHTML = ""
            img.outerHTML = strNewHTML
            i = i-1
         }
      }
   }
}
window.attachEvent("onload", correctPNG);

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