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Tuesday, July 1, 2008
WordPress Themes and Us
For a long time now, I’ve been using “out of the box” wordpress themes because I’m not familiar enough with CSS to be able to get it to do what I want (yet) and I haven’t frankly had the patience for it. I found what I thought was a great resource for wordpress themes in the website BlogohBlog (would link but that would be like advertising), from which I’ve gotten three or four themes, all of which made both Johnathan and me happy in terms of scheme, layout and utility. The current theme is from there as well. I browsed over there only to find out that that his adsense account had been suspended because he was including his adsense information in his free themes. Well, that’s not very nice – he’s piggybacking off of any traffic information from any sites that use his free themes, and since this one uses one of his as does The Golden Road, another of my blogs, and I know of a couple of other sites that friends use which use his themes. I understand that these themes are free, but gleaning our traffic stats as part of his stats is just not cool. This is particularly annoying since I discovered that one of the feed links on the site was a direct link to his site’s feed – very misleading to the newbie blogger or feed user.
I will be changing the theme here and at TGR as well as encouraging anyone I know who uses these themes to change as soon as possible. I didn’t agree to boost his stats, and even though he won’t be doing that in the future (his promise to Google in exchange for a new adsense account), it’s the principle which infuriates me. He’s taking advantage of bloggers who don’t necessarily know any better. That is not okay with me. I’m going to be shopping for new themes as soon as I get home today.
I am not willing to support someone who is willing to take advantage of those who are less web-savvy in the name of statistics and money.
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