Return of the Son of Moto
Q. i have been using your son of moto [blogger template] to build my blogspots. why do i have to have two empty, wide, side fields? pls take a look at the above reference blog. i have to put all the content in the middle, rather narrow field.
A. We regret that we cannot provide technical support for templates we designed in 2004. Please check Blogger’s Help pages and see if they answer your concerns.
Bastardized, corrupted versions of these templates—versions we did not design, based on our work but not done by us—show up all over the web. We don’t know if these bastardized, corrupted versions are authorized (i.e. we don’t know if the republishers paid a licensing fee to Google, who commissioned the templates in the first place). Millions of people use these templates, or unauthorized hacks of these templates. If you need help changing the templates to suit your needs, kindly contact your service provider.
The original templates are part of the 2004 standards-based redesign of Blogger on which we and others toiled. Google paid the least money any of us had ever received on a web design job. But we would have done the work for free. It was all about creating web-standards-based templates—about getting standards out there in a big way: a way only a product with as many users as Blogger, and an owner as powerfully influential as Google, could assure. Finances were beside the point. The reward was making standards-based stuff for millions of people to use and enjoy.
Four years on, we still get a warm feeling out of having worked on the project. But that’s not all we get. Several times a week, we get e-mails from people who want to alter our templates but lack technical know-how. We regret that we cannot debug the style sheets of the universe.
Tags: moto, son of moto, blogger, templates
Filed under: Blogs and Blogging, Google, blogger
Amen. You know how many times I’ve been tempted to preface any contact form directed at an email address of mine with “I’m (not all that) sorry, but I can’t help you fix a layout problem you probably caused yourself on work I did four years ago now for a company that has more money than god that paid very little at the time”?
A lot of times, that’s how many.
Wait, are you’re saying that buying a copy of Designing With Web Standards doesn’t come with 90-days free telephone support? Wasn’t that why you bought your iPhone in the first place — to do tech support in style?
One very real problem for developers that I’ve experienced myself is being asked to support, add new features to and fix bugs in other people’s code, long after they’ve left the organization. In those situations, one hopes that the code will be well documented and not, simply put, a mess.
I like the barrage of emails after a site has gone live. Its a great design but can we get a flash intro page? Or, the emails stating they have no money, and telling me I can make their site a case history for payment, or add it to my portfolio.
I have recieved a few of the emails, You worked on this site 7 years ago, and we need you to fix it. They seem shocked that they have to pay for a full redesign and content management system.
@Dave S., If you had a nickel for every request, I’d bet you’d have recouped a good chunk of that Google “discount”!
The permission question is interesting in all of this, too. If you put up a web design and these commercial templates get illegally (or immorally) onsold as free templates…
Most of us would never know that they’d been filched without being informed or just stumbling onto them. I wonder how many people discover theft simply from inadvertent enquiries. In this case you intended the templates to be widely available but there must be many examples of the same emails coming in to design agencies from people who weren’t clients at all.
City Needs to Ban Future Skywalks, Ameren?s is Latest to be added Shakesville: Teaspoons Oh Well: A night of speeches…. Firedoglake: Fitzgerald to Conyers: “Okay, Now I’m Ready to Talk” Jeffrey Zeldman:Return of the Son of MotoGone Mild: They Pay For this Kind of “Analysis”?
Steven: I didn’t know they’d been filched. I discovered it when I went looking for them (to create a link to them in this post). I intended my work to be widely available but I didn’t intend ugly hacks of my work to be stupidly available. :)
I think you said it best: http://twitter.com/zeldman/statuses/827563874
WOW those bastardized versions took me back circa 1955, good times. Jeffrey, you and others who have inspired so many should get together and do insight pieces about the way you write CSS. Perhaps offer a brief proof. Shawn Inman comes to mind along with so many others.
[...] 03:34PM Quote:Google paid the least money any of us had ever received on a web design job. http://www.zeldman.com/2008/06/05/return-of-the-son-of-moto/ What was that about not being evil? Reply Quote Page 28 of [...]
You mean you don’t recognize my handiwork? ;-)
Well, seriously. I haven’t seen anything this bad yet. I’ve seen ports of our templates to WordPress, LiveJournal, and others. And just last week, I saw an identical copy of Dominey’s Scribe used for a corporate non-blog site. They weren’t even using a CMS that I could tell. But I haven’t seen riffs on any of our template designs that look as bad as this.
Support emails? Still get ‘em in spades. “Why is my text disappearing?” “How do I make the right column wider?” “Where do I change my profile?”
But the emails that always pique my interest are the ones that threaten to sue Douglas Bowman and take every penny he owns because “Stopdesign” is supposedly publishing plagiarized or slanderous or harassing content. Yes, Mr. Gonnasuemyass, that’s what I do now with all the time I’m not writing on Stopdesign anymore: I register thousands of Blogger accounts with fake names, choose from any number of free templates designed by God-knows-who, then repost content without any sense of morality. Sounds like a perfectly good use of my time.
Sigh. I often I wish we had asked Blogger not to include our names and URLs in the template credits.
The good news is, the hacked and ripped-off versions don’t credit us. So we’re only getting support mails from people who use Blogger (I think).
[...] Return of the Son of Moto We regret that we cannot debug the style sheets of the universe. [...]
I know this girl, and she makes templates for a similar CMS, and even though she nicely states on her contact form that she doesn’t offer support for said templates or CMS through her website… EVERYONE EMAILS HER ANYWAY.
Not that I would know anything about that. It’s just this girl that I know. You don’t know her.
It’s the price we all pay as web designers; to see our work bastardized with inquisition. ;)
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