So, last night I blogged about how one of my articles was being reprinted at Sys-Con without my permission. I got a lot of feedback from that posting (thanks everyone), and this morning I got a personal email from the group publisher for Sys-Con. We had breakfast and he explained that what had happaned was that the article was picked out as a potential article for republication, with my permission, but that the web team had thought permission was already granted.
I did not think that there was anything malicious in what happaned, and it does seem like this is a mistake. A bad mistake - but a mistake. I did ask that the article be removed (how else will I pay for the 200 inch flat screen HDTV if I don't get my google adsense checks??) and was told that it would happen soon.
Those of you who read CFDJ know that I am involved with the magazine as the technical editor. I do not always get the chance to tech edit the articles before they go to publication, but when I do, I try to ensure they are properly written. I still feel like CFDJ is a good magazine. (And yes, I know that many people have had issues with the subscription department. I brought that up with the publisher.) I'm in kind of a special place. As you probably have noticed, over the last few months I've dramatically increased my posting amount and have tried to make this blog be the ColdFusion blog for my readers. This is not just because I'm a nice guy, I do get revenue from my sites, but I do hope that I provide a good service to my readers. So with all that being said, I'm a bit defensive about how my content is used. I think the publisher understands that now, and at least for me, I think things are resolved for now.
I will post more if the situation changes. And with that - I may be offline for a while. I'm about 20 minutes away from my final presentation (that sounds a bit morbid ;) and after that I pack to head to the airport. So if you post any questions here, it may be a good day or so before I respond.
Archived Comments
This explanation still does not make sense to me. Particularly since Sys-Con is (was.. the article was removed) claiming the copyright for the content!
Typically when a publisher reproduces an article with an authors consent you would see something like 'Reprinted by permission of Ray Camden' and not 'Copyright © 2005 SYS-CON Media. All Rights Reserved.'
Still smells fishy to me.
Well, that is probably part of the main template. We shall see. I'm surprised the article got removed that quickly.
It might be time to add something like this:
All material copyright 2005 Ray Camden. All rights reserved. Do not use w/o permission
to your footer of your pages.
Ray: I was about to send you a Trackback ping, but I noticed your autodisco has some problems.
(1) The rdf:about and dc:identifier should both be set to the permalink of the post to be pinged... right now, you've got them filled with the URI of your blog's front page instead.
(2) You're missing some trailing slashes... all the URIs look like this: http://ray.camdenfamily.comtrackback.cfm
Thanks Roger! My plan was to wrap up 4.0 this week, so this is perfect timing.
I hadn't thought about the ads before. Knowing that clicking them (relevant ones of course) will help you keep up the great content you've been adding lately, I'll be keeping a closer eye on them.
Roger, your items are fixed in my latest build, which will hopefully be up tonight (look for the blogcfc related post). Let me know if not please.
Ray: A comment and a question...
Comment: Looks good to me.
Question: Are "friendly URIs" the default in BlogCFC? If not, you might want to warn folks about the murky relationship between query-strings and Trackback.
Basically, 6A never got around to clarifying how URIs are to be treated inside the autodiscovery RDF. It seems obvious (to me) that it should be treated like normal XML, even if most tools parse it with regex. Unfortunately, I've come across at least two TB implementations that handle a URI like this:
http://foo.com/index.cfm?fo...
...in different ways. One expects the ampersand to be escaped, the other doesn't. And you can't officially declare one of them The Right Way, because the spec is silent.
So all things being equal, folks should opt for friendly URIs or expect occasional incompatibility. Except for Trackback spammers, who _always_ seem to get it right. :D
Technically - SES urls are the default, unless you have old content or you modify blog.cfc yourself. So unless folks muck with stuff, they are stuck with it.