Thou shalt not steal.
Thanks to the wonders of twitter, my favorite scaling Ruby on Rails app, I was notified this morning by Jesse Newland’s twitter that Matt Haughey’s new site Fortuitous was strangely similar to Northtemple.
From the twitterfoo of Jesse:
kinda sketched out by how much http://fortuito.us/ rips off http://northtemple.com/
Sure, we didn’t invent the “footer-as-masthead” concept. Our own Cameron Moll has written beautifully about Nodes of Inspiration and how closely we all come to stealing or borrowing ideas.
But a quick glance at Matt’s source code reveals what we like to call copy/paste detection, not only borrowing Randy Hall’s excellent CSS hacks for making that PNG fade correctly in IE, but they even copied his comments:
/* transparent png hack for ie */
Jesse calls for an “about page mention” for our (Randy Hall, Gilbert Lee, and Jason Lynes) work, to which Matt responds with a Twitter private message (the fact that this all occurred over Twitter fascinates me):
regarding the “ripped off” I mention it here: http://a.wholelottanothing.org, I liked their basic layout but didn’t copy any code or images
To his credit, Matt does include a bit (a very, very small bit) on his post over at awholelottanothing which has provided a trickle of traffic to NT today. It’s no “about page mention”, but we’ll take what we can, right?
See for yourself. The new Fortuitous:
And the current Northtemple:
Of course, imitation is the highest form of flattery, and I do see it as a compliment.
Plus, we are all commanded to forgive.
So Matt, you are forgiven. No seriously, we’re honored.
(In other news, keep your eyes open for a brand new Northtemple design in the next few days.)