Chris K Jennings Web Development

This blog design has recently received a ton of unexpected coverage throughout the internet. One of my favorite pieces comes from the nice guys at Unmatched Style who have (possibly unknowingly) awarded me with my very first video review. Make sure you check it out, and more importantly vote it up , right here.

After several failed attempts over the years, I have finally secured ChrisJennings.com and have retired the ChrisKJennings.com domain. Visiting the old domain should properly redirect you here, but let me know if you experience any issues while browsing the site.

Photo by D Sharon Pruitt. Licensed under Creative Commons.

This is a follow-up to the post entitled The anatomy of a thief.

First of all, I want to thank everyone from Twitter, Reddit and even Blog Wolkanca for your advice and support with this matter.  For the record, I have nothing but love for the Turkish people and I apologize wholeheartedly if anything was lost in translation to suggest that I thought you were all thieves.  I don’t!

As promised, here is an update as well as some advice to you creatives out there regarding yesterday’s events.

At 9:30PM EST last night, only moments after I submitted my formal DMCA complaint, Dreamhost completely shut down blog.wolkanca.com and wolkanca.com. This complete and immediate denial of service was a welcome site, although it made it clear to me how the DMCA could be abused rather easily in other, more shady situations.  Wolkanca was allowed to come back online today, but now sports a much different look with Kubrick, the default theme shipped with Wordpress. Score!

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from this:

• You have the right to stand up for yourself when your work is stolen.  Plain and simple.  It doesn’t matter if the offender is in another country or if they are not directly competing with you.  Stealing is stealing.  This goes for unauthorized derivative works, too.  Stealing the Mona Lisa and drawing a mustache on her does not make it yours.
• The DMCA is real and very effective, especially for US based web hosts.  They know they could be held liable for damages if the matter isn’t addressed promptly.
• You can play nice, but you don’t have to.  If you find an unauthorized copy of your work, there is nothing that says you have to give them a warning.  I attempted to be considerate, but you can see how that was received.
• Make things public and transparent.  Smart people make smart judgements and give great advice.  The bigger the conversation gets, the clearer the resolution becomes.
• Make sure you can back it up.  You make these claims under penalty of perjury, so it’s best that you have your ducks in a row.
• You don’t have to stop at the web host.  You can contact multiple departments at Google to remove the offending site from their index, as well as Adsense, Adwords, etc.

And finally, If you are ever unfortunate enough to go through this, here’s a DMCA template that will help you formalize your complaint. As you can see, it worked for me.  Good luck!

Yesterday I awoke to over 20 emails sent from my contact form pointing to Volkan Yilmaz’s site http://blog.wolkanca.com (i will not link to him here), pointing out his blatant and horrific rendition of this blog design.

Although I don’t speak Turkish, it was explained to me that he was called out on FriendFeed and his response was that I stole the design from him.

Thanks @spacyT for the screenshot.

With things like this, it’s always best to keep a cool head.  It wasn’t too long ago as a young designer that I was accused of being a bit too liberal with a technique being used by one of my favorite designers.  Stuff like that happens… you correct your mistake, ask for forgiveness and move on. I sent a polite request for him to remove the design in a timely manner.  He responded via Twitter (also acknowledging my friends who called him out):

volkanyilmaz

Being liberal with one’s influence is one thing, but visiting a site copying the entire layout / images / html / and css is just plain obnoxious.

Fortunately for copyright owners in the United States we have what we call the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that protects our works from such attrocities.  Mr. Yilmaz’s sites are all hosted at Dreamhost.com, a California based company that will be held liable for the copyright violations if the site remains active.

Thanks for everyone who has helped me make this public and supported my case, I will continue to keep everyone informed of the progress if I can be so lucky that there is any.

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved with the offending site’s web host.  Please read this post, Someone stole my design, now what?, for updates and details of the resolution.

Follow me and the developments of this story on Twitter

Ben Hopkins (aka kode80), a former co-worker of mine and all around great guy, has completely outdone himself with a new iPhone app called EatWillGrow.  EatWillGrow is an addictive, play-me-whenever type game with a super low barrier to entry.  I pick it up on lunch breaks, commutes or whenever else I have nothing to keep my hands moving.  The app has received great reviews all around the web and has caught the attention of internet celebrities such as Louis Gray and Bwana.TV due to it’s unique ability to “Tweet” your high-score.  This feature will ‘@ reply’ the player you beat and will likely give them a reason to try to reclaim their spot.  I also like that when I’m not playing, I can still see my current high-score rank as a badge on the EatWillGrow icon.

My #EatWillGrow high-score featured on LouisGray.com

A little known fact with huge implications is that the high-scores table is generated and kept up to date from the last 100 high scores on Twitter, making Twitter the backbone of this unique social experience.

My high-score tweet was chosen by Louis Gray for the screenshot he used in his article making me instantly #EatWillGrow famous.  Mr. Hopkins I appreciate every opportunity to ride your coat-tails.

UPDATE:

The next update will allow you to control the game by the iPhone’s accelerometer.  Here’s a sneak preview of the gameplay.

Insomnia allotted me some unexpected free time last night, giving me a chance to polish up my 404 page. Hope you enjoy.

I have never really been fully satisfied with Mail.app on the mac.  Sure, the cocoa interface and simplistic features fit well with my other mac apps, but I’ve always felt it lacked in features.

On one hand, I love how I can quickly label and sort emails based on a certain project in Gmail.  On the other, I love how I can receive Growl notifications and a badge update when I receive new emails in Mail.  Could there ever be a solution that gives me the best of both worlds?  One sure comes close.

By now you’ve probably heard of Fluid and maybe even tried it for running web apps like facebook or basecamp in their own dedicated windows.  I found that by using a Fluid instance of Gmail, I was able to access my email outside of my web browser as well as get the little badge updates when I had new email.  Fluid solves half of my needs out of the box, however, I was still missing the notification feature.

Luckily Google themselves are now provide a notifications feature for mac.  Google Notifier will give you a growl-like notification whenever there is something new in your inbox.  It will also announce your gCal events if you have any.  A quick glance is all it takes to keep up to date on whats waiting for you in gmail.

This simple tag-team is allowing me to be more productive at work as well as alleviating the worry of missing an important email.

It’s official, the band that helped shape my youth has finally reunited after a 4 year breakup. An official note from the band as well as a public announcement on last night’s Grammys solidifies the rumors set forth last week from a modlife chat with Angels and Airwaves member David Kennedy.  Some speculate that Travis Barker’s recent brush with death was a key factor in bringing everyone back together.

In honor of this event I have put together a small mixtape to help everyone kick off their monday.

After reading The Power of Less, Zen Habits author Leo Babauta’s new personal development book, I have been inspired to simplify the way I live my life — focusing on only one area at a time.  My first focus: finances.

I have always spent my money freely by eating out too often, random online services, limitless subscriptions, toys, gadgets and so on and continue to find myself waiting anxiously, if not desperately for my paycheck – time after time.

I made a resolution this year to live in the moment and just as importantly, become more aware of life and relationships. If you find yourself wanting the same things in life, I invite you to follow along.

The problem put simply:

I should have more money in the bank at the end of the month than I did at the beginning, consequently reducing unnecessary anxiety that comes along with money troubles.

The simplified solution:

Use a basic spreadsheet to track and budget my spending.  I will then use this information to become consciously aware of my spending habits, identify the essential and then eliminate what’s left.  I’ve chosen to use Google Docs for this experiment as it is tied to my Gmail account that I already happen to use (too) often.

Many of you may swear by a service such as Mint, Yodlee or Quicken Online to tap into your bank account and make these estimates and budgets automatically — and that works great, but in my case I felt like I needed a more drastic and to the point solution.

I started by making a brain-dump of everything I spend money on — rent, subscriptions, eating out, web hosting, automotive expenses etc.  I placed these items in Column A.  My list looks something like:

Next, I tried my best to make accurate estimates on how much I spend per month on each item.  I placed this info in the corresponding row of Column D.  Being inaccurate only hurts your chances of fixing the problem,  open up your online banking service of choice and try to be as close as possible.

I left column B and C in case in the future I wanted to Categorize my spending or note what account is used for the transaction.

Giving myself a few rows buffer (for spending that I may remember later on) I created a cell that adds up and displays the amount of spending in Column D by using the formulas button.  Following this, I made a cell directly to the left that holds the amount of money I make or expect to make in a given month.  Finally, I made a cell that then subtracts my total spending from my monthly income — leaving me with a solid ‘golden’ number.

Now that I have this ‘golden’ number I am able to know the amount I will have at the end of the month IF I stick to the budget outlined.  The reason this method works for me is that the reward for conscious spending is clearly marked and I have something tangible to look forward to for my efforts.

Due to all of the services available at our fingertips, common sense is often overlooked.  Getting on track, especially in my case, is first preceded with overcoming the psychology of the situation and little exercises like these — albeit low tech and somewhat obvious — are invaluable to the process.  The goal is to know exactly where your money goes and how to stop it.  I have accomplished that.  Hopefully this method will help you make the necessary cuts in your spending to live a more simple life.

The game has been changed for those of us who are sick of the troublesome process of flash image replacement with tools such as sIFR.  A new javascript-rendered alternative, Cufón, is geared to take the front-end design and development scene by storm.

Simo Kinnunen, the mastermind behind the project, had a few simple goals in mind for Cufón:

• Absolutely no plugins required - Everything needed to display Cufón is already available by default in your visitor’s browser.  Rather than requiring flash to make the switch, Cufón relies simply on javascript alone.
• Compatibility – Cufón runs perfectly on IE6, 7, 8, Firefox and the latest version of Safari.  On other unsupported browsers (IE5-, Safari 2) it will simply fail gracefully.
• Ease of use – Little or no configuration required.
• Speed – Cufón is SUPER quick.  It loads almost instantly with no ‘flicker’ that you would normally experience with sIFR.

Usage

After downloading Cufón, you will need to generate each font-face you intend to use through the tool’s homepage.  This converts your font into information usable by Cufón’s javascript.  Amazingly, this simple process is the hardest part.

In your <head> tag you will simply put something like:

<script src="cufon-yui.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="Frutiger_LT_Std_400.font.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
       Cufon.replace('h1');
</script>

[ View Example ]

And just like that, you’re <h1> tags will all be presented almost effortlessly in Frutiger LT.

With any software, there are certain usage-restrictions and known bugs, but I feel my future as a web designer is a little brighter today with the help of this technology.