Copy-and-paste

It's become a copy-and-paste world. Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of the ol' copy-and-paste tradition. I do it all the time, depending on what I am trying to do. Sometimes I find a poem that's really cool and, not wanting to print the whole page with sidebars and ads, I copy it to a Notepad document. Sometimes I copy quotes to use in my blog. Other times I copy code from certain sites. [The sites I generally go to for code help are Webmonkey for tips or a colour code chart, or perhaps to Dynamic Drive for a little funky javascript action. Or I do a Google search for whatever's relevant.]

Now, I definitely understand the times when you see someone do some particular thing on a website and you want to copy. I do that once in a while, though it's probably not proper netiquette. [I don't do it very often, mind you. Just if I find something that I can't figure out how to do myself.] I'm sure people wouldn't be too pleased if they dropped by my site to find the whole thing copy-and-pasted from their own. I know I don't like it too much when I happen by someone's page and I can tell that they got the idea from me.

I design mine from scratch so that I can feel a sense of accomplishment. I do what I want, make sure it looks mostly decent, and proceed to use it. If I start to hate it, I reinvent it. Simple. But if I see someone taking what I've designed and decided looks cool, I feel a little forlorn. It's as if my code has run away to elope with some lover and doesn't tell me until years down the line when I see that my code is single with two children and is pregnant with a third ... [Okay, I'm getting carried away. You know what I mean.]

Bottom line: don't steal other people's hard work. It takes a lot of energy to get things to line up the way that they do, to ge the colours just right, to organise a page in a concise manner so that it flows well and reads smoothly.