I’ve been subject to finding rip-offs of my work in my time, but a recent rip of Design Shack worries me a little. Not only has the guy copied my website exactly, he has also set up the archives page to - rather than link to the authors site - provide downloadable, ripped templates of other people’s designs.

This is pretty low as far as I’m concerned, and I’m quite annoyed. I don’t mind if people just rip my site - I just contact them, their hosts and and other service provider to try to get the site taken down. But when they are using a rip of my site to provide copies of other people’s, it’s annoying. To say the least. I’ve contacted Geocities to ask them to close the account, and we’ll see how it progresses.

I’m not posting the URL of the page in question - His site doesn’t need any publicity.

I got a letter from my broadband provider - Blueyonder (UK) - yesterday, stating that they are upgrading my 1mb Broadband line to 4mb for no additional fee. This is great news, and it just further secures my position with Telewest. They are a great broadband provider, and I plan to continue using them for years to come. I’ve had no real downtime since we opened an account with them a good 3 years ago, and I can’t recommend them enough.

I’m pleased to say that Design Shack has had over 18,000 entry views in it’s first fortnight online, and over 6,000 click throughs to the various featured designs. And it’s growing every day. I’ve been really pleased with the response to the site, and it has been a very successful launch. I think I need to plug the RSS feed a bit more - there’s a disproportionate number of people using it.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out.

It seems that Opera has decided to drop the advertisements in it’s browser, and go freeware. To make up for the loss in revenue, they are now offering premium support for serious customers (read: businesses). I think this is a great step forward, and I’m sure it will encourage a much wider takeup of the browser.

Personally, I’m not an opera fan. I think that it’s a little too feature packed for my liking - i know that might sound ridiculous - but I like most of my software to be fairly slim, well trimmed and do the job it was made to do very well.

Had some hard disk issues with the server yesterday, never fun. Thankfully, our provider sorted things out this morning with no data loss. Unfortunately, the downtime meant a server reboot, which lost us our just over one year of uptime. Never mind! A new year, a new start - may there be another 365 days of uninterrupted server goodness.

I realise that to all you Americans, this is just old hack. But these things only came out in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and they are sold out everywhere already. I had the chance to play with a PSP for a couple of days recently, borrowing it off my uncle. For the first time, I actually understood what all the fuss was about. It’s a marvel of engineering, and it just about does everything you could want it to.

The screen is a work of art. I have never seen such a bright, clear display on any handheld gadget before. I’ve been experimenting with Medievil, Wipeout and a strange game called Mercury. Unfortunately, I don’t own a Memory Stick Duo - only a Memory Stick Pro - so I couldn’t really try it with video or photos etc. That’s a shame, because I would really like to see how the interface works for it.

But as much as I like it, two things will stop me buying one (no, it’s not the price - I think that’s pretty reasonable). Firstly, the cost of games - way out of proportion, and completely ridiculous. Unless someone finds a way to download them and stick em on a Memory Stick, that’s a big problem. Secondly, the lack of a hard drive. That’s just terrible. What good is a 1gb Memory Stick when I want to store all my photos, music and videos. A hard drive (even a smallish 4gb flash one like the new iPod Nano) would have made my drop my iPod and run to the local game store.

Maybe in the PSP2….