HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/vpmFd25tRqo&hl"width="450" height="370"][/gv]

If your site gets any traffic at all, chances are your RSS feed is scraped and misused by some one trying to score on SERP for the work you have toiled on. This very blog is constantly ripped by sploggers who have no regards to intellectual property rights or just plain simple dumb to realize they are stealing. Here are three sites where you can find the entire content of our blog scraped/ripped/stolen and posted as their own. Of course I did not link to them because I really don’t want you to visit them:

myblogmix.com (this m^*&*0 f$%*r even uses one of our themes on his splog!)
frenzygraphics.com
urlfan.com

How do you stop them?
Jonathan Bailey, a security expert (Plagiarism Today) who also writes on Blog Herald, lists 6 steps to identify and fight content theft. We religiously followed the suggestions for months now (that post on BH was from last November), but none worked thus far. Google is yet to acknowledged our letters (used his cease and desist letter templates, which is a good source, thanks!). I even took solace in thinking maybe they have a backlog or that they will eventually write back, but nothing really happened.

A high level opinion poll concerning WordPress themes and its future is presented on Ian’s new site Theme Shaper. Highly recommended read for WordPress theme designers and enthusiasts alike. I have my 2 cents in there too!

Caroline Middlebrook has published a free eBook about making money with niche sites powered by WordPress. The books discusses Google Adsense, WordPress plugins and tips on monetizing your site with relevant content. The eBook is a recommend read for new and old bloggers alike. Grab your copy from here.

OK, the ordeal is over for the 6 Bulgarian and the solo Palestinian doctor, Sarkozy and his sidekicks got the much needed political boast, but for over 400 children infected with the AIDS virus, the monitory compensation is nothing more than a slap on the face by rich Europeans nations and an utter disrespect to the value of human life, especially the lives of the under-privileged.

Simple math (as we always use) suggest that a child in Africa can be infected with aids (knowingly or due to poor working conditions- whatever) for a million USD, or less than £500,000 per child.

How much will it cost to infect …

So we are not trying to wait it out or anything like that, we are just as sick of it as y’all are so let’s get this thing done and over with. Today will not go down in history as the day WordPress died; in fact it’s the opposite. In my opinion, WordPress is the best open source CMS out there, and can remain that way if we all took the chill pill and got our acts together.

Talking about acts, here’s a confession to add for your weekend gossip, Mark and I have lived a dual life for the past 4 months on WordPress both as designers and as the moderator of themes.wordpress.net, yes we were cleaning out the mess and doing the dirty job while Matt and Mark (Gosh) were busy smearing us with the tar of being the bad guys. But as Matt would thanklessly say, “no one asked us to do it”, we volunteered!

So why are we only coming out now? We do not seek attention, but this might be the best opportunity to bring to the attention of the WP communities some of the challenges we are facing today that must be addressed and could very well be prevented when Matt takes over the themes repository completely (as widely speculated) for whatever the reason. Think of this as the “Moderators” public service announcement. But before we go, I would like to clear the air and talk a little about why and how we got here in the first place.

Bush vetoed the war-spending bill again! In a repeat of the famous 2003 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush, this time speaking from the Jedi Temple said “4 years and $500,000,000,000 dollars later, the mission remains accomplished”.

This leads me to the question, what else could we have done with a meager $500 billion? Experts say, $500 billion can fund our Social Security program for the next 75 years and a quick calculation tells me that we can give every individual on this planet, (terrorist or otherwise) $85 each!

In summary, somewhere along the spending spree, 1) we forgot all about bin Laden, 2) blindly theorized …

I took the backseat for much of this debate that has been raging for a few weeks now, but it’s time for my response. At Headsetoptions, we are two designers with over 70 themes to our humble credit, some original, some modified and most ported from free CSS templates designed by our friends, and most of our themes created with the aid of sponsors. Why am I saying this, and why now? Well, today, there was a huge cry about “Sponsored Themes” on a popular download site and hoards of users and designers decided to jump on the “kill the designers” bandwagon …

You heard it right! Since they have no balls to stop President Bush from sending more troops, “Congress must use its main power - the power of the purse - to put an end to our involvement in this disastrous war,” says Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold. And I agree!

 

While the rest of the world is busy fighting the “War on Terror�, our Spanish counterpart are busy snorting! According to a recent study, 94 percent of all banknotes circulating in Spain contains traces of cocaine. Anyone who know statistics knows that 94 percent pretty much means all notes considering 5 to 10 percent limit of experiment or in layman’s term, error!

Bravo.

This brings us to the next discount of poll!

What in your opinion is the biggest domestic threat faced by your country? Comment or poll.

Update 01/10/2007: Irish beat the Spaniards | 100% of their notes have Cocaine