i’ve been using the internet and posting designs within its ever expanding web for quite some time. palesky.com alone has been around since before the turn of the new millennia (i can’t be sure if it actually launched in ’97 or ’98) so i’ll be the first to admit that i’ve been really lucky when it comes to web thievery. granted, most of my designs on palesky have been really unconventional and probably couldn’t be ripped template style, so over the years all i’ve really had to deal with is a stolen image or two, and during my later years of hebetude i didn’t even really care.

for the past couple of weeks i’ve been motivated more than usual, and some of that motivation spilled its way into the web which produced the latest interface you see here. like anyone, i was proud of what i had created, proudly showing its sleek lines and ideas of randomness, and although it didn’t receive the fanfare or praise of my previous designs (probably because of my inactivity and/or the changing face of web design accessibility) i was and still am proud of it nonetheless.

with pride comes a greater sense of loss.

i was going through my weekly stats when i happened to stumble upon this site. mild shock set through my system. was this for real? after years of escaping the experience of having my IP taken from, had it finally reared its ugly head? my brain immediately zoomed here and there – i thought of how i had only read jeff‘s “ripped” post a couple of days ago and thought of how i was glad i didn’t have to deal with being ripped off like some of the mentioned subjects posted in his entry.

over several days i watched as the code was gutted, its insides forcibly changed to be something different, yet undeniably the same. for awhile some of my banners and random graphics were still within the code but has since disappeared. still, within its code there can still be found major references to my site – hell, even the images are within a “palesky” directory.

my shock switched to flattery, and now to confusion. my friends ask if i’m angry, and to be honest i really am not because i’m hoping i can find a way to take back what is mine – but am unsure as how to proceed. so i’m looking to you, my friends, the design community, the web community, my family – what would you suggest? will a simple email explaining my thoughts to the perps suffice? or will an aggressive calling to arms be the only way to communicate?

fuck – i can’t even read czechoslovakian – for all i know they could be crediting me all over their site.

i’m going to jump right past the whole pc element involving favicons because there’s more than enough documentation in regards to that. for those of you who don’t know what i’m talking about, i’m referring to those nifty little icons that appear in the address bar of your browser right beside the URL you are currently viewing. that’s a favicon. mine should look like this:

as far as i could tell, this has always been a pain in the ass for mac users to make – i took several minutes looking over each of my current graphic applications and couldn’t find anything that would convert or save anything i made into a *.ico file. after enough looking around i discovered a program that could do it (GraphicConverter), and it only took a few seconds to convert what i had made – a 16 x 16 pixel .bmp file – into a 4-bit (16 colors) windows icon. i uploaded it to my root directory and was good to go. for the most part.

safari, my main browser of choice, would not show my new favicon for the life of me. firefox, internet explorer, camino all had no problems and showed my new bundle of joy without a hitch. it turns out that safari has a little trouble emptying the favicon cache, and simply using the “Empty Cache…” command under the safari menu won’t work. in order to get the new favicon to appear, i had to close safari and then remove the Icon folder which was located at ~/Library/Safari/Icon. you can either move it to the trash, or move it somewhere outside of the Safari directory, which might be good in case something screwy happens, but so far i’ve had no problems.

one other thing web design related: why the fuck did it take me so long to get into CSS? gawd.