But I don’t really like that solution.

I think I might change my approach and make a new commenting policy rule. A quite simple one at that: Every comment that uses some kind of product name as their “name” will be deleted (also those who were made before today), no questions asked, and I re-establish the DoFollow plugin.

I can always delete the links that lead to sites I don’t want to support afterwards, although I’d of course need to introduce an explicit disclaimer for that as well. (Luckily, my current disclaimer reads “I reserve the right to delete spam as I see fit, even if it’s handcrafted”, so I won’t break any promises if I delete things that are spammier than I like retroactively).

On the other hand, I really love your contributions, and I really don’t want to make contributing with comments harder than it apparently already is…

What do you think? How do you handle that kind of thing in your own blog(s)?

First things first: WordPress themes are GPL, they have to be redistributable under the GNU General Public License. Necessarily, the PHP code (although not the CSS or image elements of a theme) has to be, since it is based on WordPress’ GPL code, GPL. Legal wording:

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

Speaking of our specific case of Thesis again, the logic is probably less sparse than in your everyday theme, but every other word except “sparse” fully holds, so I guess it’s not that exceptional in this regard. Or can anybody with legal training assist me, am I wrong there?

The guys at Thesis now go and forbid owners of Thesis to remove the backlink to the Thesis site. I appreciate that such a backlink is a great marketing and SEO measure, but I don’t see the legal grounds for such a thing really. They can certainly sell push-style upgrades, and the images they provide with the theme, and of course their support and forums. But the theme itself seems to be necessarily open source, so the Thesis pricing model seems to need re-evaluation.

Edit 2009-07-19 16:20: Just do clarify, unless I am mistaken they can certainly ask money from people for the theme – there are no limits for monetizing distribution in the GPL. However, they don’t seem to be allowed to restrict people’s rights to redistribute and alter the theme.

Particularly in the Swiss blogosphere, with the recent Thesis craze, I think this is fairly important information. What do you think? Or did I misunderstand some legal background?

If you notice any issues, I’d be glad about a comment here. The FTP upload had some hickups and corrupt files that I fixed, and might well have had some that I didn’t.

(Oh, and nope, the diploma thesis is not done yet )

I’ll get back to blogging after that. So the blog is not quite dead yet

In unrelated news, I’m sure you know this video.

So, he made a blog. From his post about what self-defense actually is:

Self-defense is the ability to come out of violent situations alive and if possible unhurt and with all of your possessions. For most persons, self-defense is learning how to beat someone up (or use any other suitable technique like throws, locks,…). This is the stuff you will learn in most martial-arts or self-defense classes. Unfortunately this is only a part of the whole self-defense business.

Learn more on Ste’s self-defense Blog!

Bye Slug.ch

As a rather important sidenote: There I was, thinking I’d have done a great service for Ste when I told him that the best thing he could do to promote his shiny new blog was sign it up for all those blog directories (link German) we have in Switzerland. I guess the advice wasn’t all bad (despite the fact that this blog here isn’t really old either), after all I do get some visits from those as well…

But today, I looked at one of them, Slug.ch, and was greeted with a short “bye” message. Well, uhm … bye, I guess I wonder if we’ll ever find out what it was that made Benny Rüegg stop?

BloggingTom doesn’t know much more (link German), but he has plenty of nice links for web history nuts (like me), and way more of them can be found at tou.ch.

Update 08-09-19 13:01: Meh, Slug.ch is back online. I agree with BloggingTom when he writes:

Hey, Benny, immer dieses Hin und Her mit Slug. Da kommt man ja kaum noch hinterher!

Unlike him though, I do think that such aggregators do serve an important function in the blogosphere: They allow you to find blogs you might like, they allow new bloggers to introduce their blog to a wider audience, and they allow searches through a particular subset of the global blogosphere.

All of those are important functionalities that hold us all together – so if Slug is not it, because of all those “sell-keep” and “stop-restart” inconsistencies, it’d have to be something else. I guess the fact that nothing else is as technically refined as Slug is then also the reason for the big backlash the too short “bye” message provoked.

I’ll take this opportunity to list all the plugins I found useful in my quest for a highly useable and convenient blogging experience for my readers, search engines, and me.

• Akismet – utterly awesome anti-spam plugin
• All in one SEO pack – for things like meta tags, rewriting titles, specifying which archives robots should search
• Breadcrumb NavXT – because I like breadcrumbs
• Google XML Sitemaps – more candy for search engines
• Lightbox 2 – because lightboxes look nice
• Admin Drop Down Menu – makes life easier for me when doing admin stuff
• Robots Meta – to avoid indexing of unnecessary stuff
• Search Unleashed – because it sucks less (still not perfect though)
• SEO Friendly Images – not sure if that’d still be necessary, but whatever, alt and title are good
• Simple Tags – easier tagging, nice tag cloud
• StatPress – you got me, I’m tracking you…
• Subscribe To Comments – nobody’s using this yet
• WP-PostRatings – those little stars below the posts removed
  
• WP-Syntax – syntax highlighting for my coding posts, really handy
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – aah, more gadgets

That’s it, my extensive collection (I removed the Ajax edit one, it slowed down the site horribly)

Update 08-09-10 12:00: I couldn’t stand having invalid CSS, so I changed some plugin CSS code and adapted the theme a bit further as well. The bad news: Rounded corners for image frames are gone. The good news:

Hooray

The WordPress plugins collection is extensive and had tons of things I like – starting with the Widgets you see to the right, showing my latest stuff from del.icio.us and Twitter, continuing with changes under the hood like a better search engine and a spam filter, and not stopping with AJAX image popups and automatic code highlighting for future programming posts (or even your comments). Gee was I silly coding my last blog myself.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with these narcistic ramblings anymore – at least until I change something really big