You say ‘homage’, I say ripoff: cakeordeathsite’s What a Life!

So via mefi I find this: What A Life! | cakeordeathsite.

I love it when people discover this book. It’s been a minor obsession of mine for nearly 30 years. I first put it on the web in March 2000 and updated it to then-current web standards in 2003: What a Life!: an autobiography. Over the years I’ve received a bunch of interesting notes from fans and even a couple from relatives of the authors. I marked it up the old, hard way: by scanning pages then re-keying the text. OCR wasn’t that great back in the day.

So I get kind of irked that this cakeordeath fella lifts my pictures and markup wholesale. Shame he didn’t understand how to copy CSS, ‘cos his formatting comes out worse than mine:

cakeordeath’s rendering, viewed 2018-04-01 18:22:34
my rendering, viewed 2018-04-01 18:23:20

Crack open View Source on his https://cakeordeathsite.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/what-a-life/ and f’rinstance my Chapter 1, http://scruss.com/wal/chapter1.html:

mine:

<div>
<p><span class="smallcaps">I</span> was born very near the end of the
year. <img src="Images/wal009a.jpg" width="112" height="104"
alt="calendar showing 29 December" class="right" /></p> 
</div>

<p>The grange where I was born was situated in a secluded corner of
the Chiltern Hills. Rumour had it that Queen Elizabeth had slept
there.</p>

<div class="centre"><img src="Images/wal009b.jpg" width="160"
height="232" alt="doll's house" /></div>

cakeordeath’s:

<div>
<p><span class="smallcaps">I</span>&nbsp;was born very near the end of the year.<img class="right" src="https://i1.wp.com/scruss.com/wal/Images/wal009a.jpg" alt="calendar showing 29 December" width="112" height="104"></p>
</div>
<p>The grange where I was born was situated in a secluded corner of the Chiltern Hills. Rumour had it that Queen Elizabeth had slept there.</p>
<div class="centre"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/scruss.com/wal/Images/wal009b.jpg" alt="doll's house" width="160" height="232"></div>

I mean, come on … including my domain and image path scruss.com/wal in his image urls? Otherwise, it’s whitespace difference. I dunno, these kids today: lift anything without credit, so they would. Seems this dude is a semi-popular blogger, and I’d be vastly annoyed if he were getting ad revenue for this, while I did this for fun and it’s cost me to host it all these years.

There’s a further uncredited lift from Chris Mullen’s oldweb classic, Visual Telling of Stories. cakeordeath’s banner page scan is straight out of Chris’s Collage Pioneers: E.V.Lucas and George Morrow, What a Life! 1911 with the same file name. Was there credit? Was there shite …

1 comment

  1. First of all let me apologise. I can assure that I posted about What A Life because I love the book and because I mainly write about Surrealism and Dada and I like to post little known gems that I believe deserve a wider audience. Nothing more and nothing less.
    You are quite correct that I didn’t know how to crack the source code, I am quite computer illiterate and haven’t a notion about programming etc. I can assure that I receive no advertising revenue (chance would be a fine thing).
    Once again my apologies. Please inform me how you would like to resolve this issue, I can certainly credit yourself or alternatively delete my post (though I would prefer not to).

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