Protecting my work

So as you already heard the last time I updated this site, I’ve been giving away themes for Virb over at Free Profile Looks. My first two themes have been quite well received and I think the site will continue to be a fun project as long as Virb continues to be successful.

Something I had to think about when I was working on my first theme to give away was the problem of users taking the CSS portion of a theme on the site without taking the HTML portion and basically getting the design without putting the link back to my site. Unlike MySpace where the content and styling are mixed together and it’s hard to steal a theme without getting the attribution, Virb has the CSS and HTML portions of a profile clearly separated so a person could just take the CSS portion of my theme without copying the accompanying HTML (if this doesn’t make sense to you, look at the how-to page and you’ll see).

Now I could put a banner on the background image for every theme that says something like “theme by freeprofilelooks.com,” since the images are on my own server, but I didn’t want to go down that route just yet. Maybe in the future I will have to consider it, but I wanted to try something a little different and less intrusive. Something that would mimic the HTML attribution portion of a theme when that portion isn’t there. This is what I came up with:

The default Virb profile markup has a #body_container div and a #profile_container div. You put your background stuff on the #body_container, you set a width on the #profile_container, and you have your two wrappers for the profile markup. The last container inside of these wrappers is #comments. I figured that in the absence of any extra HTML, the best thing to do would be to add some padding to the bottom of #comments and put a background image there with some message, like what I have now: “please attribute freeprofilelooks.com.” Then, I could instruct users to to place a snippet of HTML with an #attribution container right below #comments, which has matching CSS that gives it a negative margin and opaque background so the container moves up and covers this background image.

So what do you get if you don’t add the HTML like my site instructs one to do? You get this:

And since this little image is sitting on my own server, I can change it at any time. Tomorrow it could read, “stolen from freeprofilelooks.com,” and the next day it could read, “this profile is bollocks.” Whatever suits my fancy, really. With the HTML in place like it’s supposed to be, you get this:

That little paragraph is bumped up and covering the image, so everything is peachy. And since all of my themes will probably follow the basic Virb setup (because I’m making these themes for people who don’t know how to do advanced customization), I can keep using this technique and always be sure that one way or another, people will know that my work is my work. That’s a good feeling.

And if I ever feel like putting some time into sleuthing, I could look into my server logs and find everyone that’s using one of my themes, just to see if they are all using them properly… but I’d rather do more exciting things with my free time. I should, however, mention that I looked up a couple referrers the other day and I ought to give a shout-out to a couple adopters of my latest theme:

• Nick proves that freeprofilelooks.com isn’t hard to use… mission accomplished.
• J is looking good with a customized version… I like how he tweaked the colors.

Nice, eh?