A wonderfully crafted and beautifully designed system to help any and all designers when it comes to Grid Designs/Layouts. Thanks for the awesome resource Nathan!!

I don’t write about many of these things, like when Simplebits (Dan) had their logo ripped off, or when The City Church got it’s design stolen. But this time I haven’t seen anyone write about it.

I was perusing a couple sites that had information on being a professional blogger or just ways to make money at home and off the internet. Come on, who doesn’t want their own home based business and the opportunity to work for themself!!!

Anyway, this is what I came across:

Hey! Who’s that handsome man in that profile?

And then here’s the thief:


And it’s ironic, don’t you think? Why Do Work when you can copy someone else’s stuff? Hmmmm…

I am not going to turn this into a one vs the other or even a review of those that are most popular out there. I know there are tons, some full and rich with features and others that are super light and to the point (just editing text). But, when I am not at work using Visual Studio for my development, I am usually at home writing PHP, HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc…by hand.

With that, you usually want to find a nice editor that has the features you want and makes things as simple as possible to complete your task. Here’s a list of some very nice Text Editors for the PC:

Notepad++ (my editor of choice at the moment)
Intype
Crimson Editor
HTML Kit
Aptana
Notepad2
E Text Editor (they say will rival TextMate for the Mac, but I can’t justify paying for one when there are soooo many good ones out there that are FREE)
UltraEdit (again, why pay?)

The main reason I even started this article was because I was getting tired of the simple white backgrounds. Yeah, you can go in and change colors through some of the options, but it’s just not right. You can’t ever get the color scheme correct. So, I did a quick search for a nice theme for one of these editors…and since I already use Notepad++ as my primary Text Editor for my PC at home…I downloaded and installed Port of Ruby Blue theme. And let me tell you, this is one nice theme and it’s very easy on the eyes!!! I highly recommend this theme if you don’t want to spend endless hours trying to get your own theme complete.

Here are a couple I’ve used for the Mac:
Coda
TextMate
Bluefish

These two are kind of different in they are the WYSIWYG editor:
Amaya
Nvu (pronounced N-view)

And this is a nice little Suite of Products with both free Text Editor and WYSIWYG Editor: Trellian, Trellian WebPage, Trellian CodePad. They have a ton of other cool products too…go check them out!

I’ve read and discussed this topic for a little over a year now. I was and still am your classic open source style of developer. I write PHP almost every chance I get (mostly for freelance work). But, when it comes down to it…the market where I live doesn’t bode well for the open source market. Right now the to hottest languages are Java and C# (as well as ASP.NET). I’ve looked long and hard for positions where I could do more PHP or Python or even Ruby. But the fact remains to hold true that more money is made (when you still want to ‘work for the man’) when you stick with Java or .NET. Now, I’ve recently switch to more .NET development…but this article is worth linking to:

Give .NET a Break

I love reading what those guys over at ParticleTree.com post up…so read some of their other stuff too…especially their Web App Autopsy post.

So, in all, the foot is placed on the table from the .NET side of things…and my passion still sits with the open source arena. To each his/her own I guess.

Links across the Internet are spreading fast…so I am sure you probably already know or have read about this. LogoMaid was called out for, what is evident to everyone, the copied/lifted/what ever you want to call it…logo recently released for SimpleBits new design.

Here are a few examples that others have posted:

You can also follow a long discussion on the flickr post made by Dan. Soon after Dan posted about this, John Gruber made a post that hit the front page of Digg. Not soon after I read through most of those I flipped over to one of my other frequent sites. There it was, another rip by LogoMaid, this time they hit the Godbit Project.

I am sure there’s not a lot that can be done here. I am sure it’ll all calm down after a while. But the past few months I have seen this sinking trend of rips and lifts that’s placing a cloud over this industry for me. Maybe I am getting too involved with it…and maybe I need to back off and just worry about myself and my work. But when I see well respected and internet gurus/standardistas like Dan and those at 31three.com get copied/stolen/whatever (see where http://www.thecity.org/ was lifted by this guy’s adventure site, and yes he even took the css almost completely and then in the about page said it’s all his.) I feel compelled to at least follow suit and let it be known.

So this post is my voice, and I’ll leave it at this…this post.