I'm baaaaaaaaaack!

They say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.  I guess I should be flattered by the way that Mike Jefferson has copied my web sites.  I went to junior high school with him, and he's a nice guy, but he needs to branch out a little more on his design concepts. 

Take his weblog, versus my weblog.  Okay, we're both using the same pre-made theme, so it'll look similar.  But I specifically changed some of the fonts and colors, added my webcam, the Manila badge, and a search bar for the site. [Update: He changed his weblog to a different theme]

Now take his personal site and compare it to my web site.  Anything look similar to you?  Read the first lines.  Yeah, I thought so. [Now also changed]

Finally, take a look at his webcam, and my webcam.  Convinced?

Everyone on the web borrows from other sources, I do it too.  But if you're going to borrow, at least credit your source, or take the time to come up with some original text.

That said, a lot of my style for this site is borrowed from John, as well as Al, and subconsciously from many others, I'm sure.  I blatantly swiped my webcam code from Leia, but she didn't mind.

So what's my gripe? I don't know, it was just bugging me.  What do y'all think, am I off-base here?

Update: Dan weighs in with his thoughts...  Mike posts his side of the story...

Well, yesterday's little snafu left a lot of us editthispage.com users without our weblogs for a day, much to our displeasure.  Fortunately, Userland got us back up and running, by this morning.  I'd like to complain, I really would, but I'm not paying anything to use this site, so I don't really think I have the right to.  TANSTAAFL and you get what you pay for.

Yesterday, Buy.com had these on sale for $129.95.  I bought one, and using the $10 off coupon for new customers made it even cheaper.  Final price, after shipping was $127.92.  I needed a new CD-RW drive for home use, my 2X drive just doesn't cut it anymore.  This one had been given high marks by MaximumPC, and it has the "burn-proof" technology that is supposed to stop you from making coasters instead of CDs.