One day we stumbled upon a page that had stolen our website design. It was not a question if they had borrowed ideas from us but they had literally stolen everything. The html, css, images and even had our logo up! Our website is zeroturnaround.com and their, jbrute.info (the one which stole the design).

My first reaction was that I’ll just drop them an email, make sure that they’re aware that it is a crime (is it?) and order them to take it down and problem solved. We have no interest of suing anybody. Maybe they were just playing around. Here is a picture how it looked at that time.

The plan was easy but getting contact information was not. At least they had taken down our contact information from the footer. Not finding even an email (then again, smart move, too many stories of criminals accidently leaving their card at the scene of the crime) from the webpage I turned to DNS whois. Whois records show

Domain ID:D32012015-LRMS
Domain Name:JBRUTE.INFO
Created On:24-Mar-2010 20:00:01 UTC
Last Updated On:24-Mar-2010 20:15:33 UTC
Expiration Date:24-Mar-2011 20:00:01 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:GoDaddy.com Inc. (R171-LRMS)
Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:CR44517482
Registrant Name:Conor Ryan
Registrant Organization:Warlock 999 Development
Registrant Street1:One Vernon Drive
Registrant City:Vernon
Registrant State/Province:New Jersey
Registrant Postal Code:07976
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.5555555555
Registrant *************@warlock999.info

All emails sent to warlock.info or jbrute.info bounce. Googling the name and address does not bring much up. It’s like a dead end. I’ve also contacted the registrar and hosting, still waiting for replies. They’ve updated their website design today, removed the video, our logo and put up some text.

What are my options to deal with something like this? Proving that the design belongs to us should be easy (the html is too similar). How should I go about documenting this? I did make a screenshot when I first stumbled upon, but you could always say that I’m good in Photoshop.

Are there other options to contact a domain name owner besides information from website and WHOIS?

Until now we’ve got away with most of the jokes we’ve pulled but we have matured over the period and we’re not the same young naive happy hackers anymore (right!). We still do like to throw a joke in every now and then.

We released a XML configuration file schema with our last product release and we had to pick a schema location for that. Remembering the Mozilla Ghostbusters reference we also had to reference something. And so we did.

But last week we got an email from our pointy haired boss. He had made a memo with 5 points about the documentation we have. The last point read: Why is there an alderaan in the namespace? It should be our product name!

I guess this marks a landmark in our small team, we’re not small anymore and we’ll have to figure out a way to keep the pointy haired occupied with something (Google Analytics usually does the trick). Luckily for us, we could still play the founder card, but later we may not be so lucky. What jokes have you managed to sneak by your boss and how did you hide them?

PS. We did not have to change our schema but it came quite close.

Most likely it would be easier to have a service that just posts RSS updates to IM, but Twitter’s already there and with its great API there’s a lot of third-party services around it.

What does this mean? TwitterFeed will just check the feed every half an hour and repost it to twitter. However, I’m not subscribed to Twitter via RSS. The only way I get Twitter updates is through Google Talk IM. Which means, that I get updates only when I’m online and they never accumulate in Google Reader (I tend to just delete all entries in a category if it goes over 30).

Getting updates in realtime means that you can also sort through them immediately, which is usually much easier than delaying until later and doing all-at-once. This helps cope with the amount of information I go through every day. I just wish that every news site would provide a twitter bot by default…

P.S. You can follow downgrade via a twitterfeed bot as well.

There are tons of plugins out there and only a couple support these features. Why? Well, if you look at the Writing a Plugin documentation you see that a plugin can be packaged absolutely in any possible way.

Plugins can be zip, rar, gz, bz2 etc. archives. They can contain any number of subdirectories that the administrator has to copy to certain other folders and the requirement of meta information is quite relaxed. The automation of installation, upgrade, deletion, versioning for all the plugins is impossible with such relaxed rules.

WP plugins (like the others already have — FF extensions, Eclipse plugins, Google Gadgets, WARs …) should have a solid structure so that the management of the plugins could be automated. One click install, update notifications or automatic updates, public repositories and other cool features can be built upon this.

Besides all the other great ideas already posted I’ve submitted one that would try to address these problems from more ground up.