More and more, it’s looking like the reasons for matt disliking barthelme had less to do with the link in the footer, than some personal dislike. i say this because it’s christmas. and my brand new christmas theme has a footer link to a very sploggy looking christmas site. the link in my dashboard is a to a subdomain with information about the theme.
Now, granted, christmas is about as ad-ridden and commercial as holidays come. But if it’s ok to choose a theme with a link like this, and leave the link in the footer, then surely it would have been ok to install barthelme, and remove the link to flower delivery? At least with Scott, we know who he is. Keith (of amazing christmas ideas) was too scared of being linked to his splog, so he registered with domainsbyproxy.com.
I suspect that the real issue is that it would’ve been too difficult to re-write Ozh’s theme toolkit from scratch, so that barthelme’s fantastic font options would be available to wordpress.com users.
via Blogger’s Blurt.
6 comments
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22 Dec 2006 at 9:11
Matt
Although the domain originally bothered me, it has the spammy-lots-of-hyphens feel, and the adsense is a little obnoxious in places, I think it’s a legit site. After exchanging some emails with Keith he gave us use of the theme under GPL instead of CC, so we could remove the link if we wanted, but there’s nothing wrong with the site I can see.
22 Dec 2006 at 9:47
adam
i poked around the site a bit, and i came to the same realization. i still posted this because it’s still a commercial site, in a way that other theme homepages aren’t. i’m not about to advertise his business, in the same way that if i were running barthelme, i’d strip the flower delivery link. sploggy might be a bit strong for keith, but in light of wordpress.com’s anti-commercial stance, it sticks out like a sore thumb. most theme authors could run their blogs on wordpress.com without the adsense. i think keith would get caught in a ‘report as spam’ dragnet.
22 Dec 2006 at 5:41
Matt
We’ve never had an anti-commercial stance, that’d be a little silly since we’re a commercial entity ourselves. I just personally think that introducing free-for-all ads/etc would have unintended consequences, and not having ads hasn’t really impacted our growth. (It’s not a big deal to most people.) I still Barthelme on my desktop, I may look at it again later, but right now we’re heavy on white and minimalist themes but the demand is really for darker stuff, so that’s where you’ll see it lean for a few weeks.
22 Dec 2006 at 7:16
adam
i mean anti-commercial in the sense of mark’s post, especially david’s comment. it’s something that went back and forth in the forums recently, regarding the terms of service, which specifically forbid commercial blogs.
anyway, good to hear, both about dark themes, and that you would consider barthelme again. hope your holidays are fun.
22 Dec 2006 at 7:40
vermillion « wordpress™ wank
[...] Adam continues picking up the Christmas slack with news of yet another dodgy wordpress.com theme. [...]
23 Dec 2006 at 5:10
Keith
Amazing Christmas Ideas is definitely not a splog. In fact, we receive a lot of emails from people thanking us for the articles and ideas. And analysis of our log files shows that visitors have printed our articles hundreds of times and emailed the site to friends dozens of times in the month of December alone.
If it didn’t have adsense and a few affiliate links on it I doubt you would have referred to it as a splog. But considering how many splogs have adsense, I can understand the misconception.
About the domain hyphens – if I could go back and change that, I would. Simply because it gives some people a bad impression, as it did with Matt.
About domainsbyproxy – I’m not scared to be linked to Amazing Christmas Ideas. I used private registration because I didn’t want an inbox full of junk mail, which is what happened to me the last time I used public registration. If you were to look at the about us page, you’d see we’re actually quite open about who we are. I’m proud to be associated with Amazing Christmas Ideas.