Hey everyone!
I owe a small debt of gratitude to a site that put up a short tutorial on creating a smiley generator. I won’t link to them, however, for reasons which will become clear.
There was a short tutorial that basically had a circle, a pair of eyeglasses, and a simple mouth. The circle was 18×18 pixels, and was a pretty generic “smiley” body. I started fooling around with the idea of creating my own smiley generator, but I didn’t like the idea of having to click a button and reload the entire page every time I wanted to change a piece, and without seeing the piece I was using.
So I started learning AJAX, and I ended up creating the basic version of the site we have here now. I added hundreds of smiley parts, most of them created from scratch by myself, some taken from public domain smileys. I left those three little graphics in my list of hundreds of parts because honestly, I didn’t see what harm would come from using a simple yellow circle (18×18 pixels!) when smileys were all over the internet and they all looked basically the same.
Dun dun dun! Cue the dramatic music! I was served with a DMCA copyright notice for using what is an almost universal body shape and color. I just happened to use theirs, and they didn’t like the competition, I guess. Oh, and they didn’t even bother sending e-mail first. My email address is easily available at the bottom of the page, and I do read it on a daily basis.
So, I immediately replaced the offending images. Mea culpa. I screwed up, I admit it; I went back to the site and they specifically say not to use their graphics on other sites. (At least, they do now.)
I’ve been busy with other projects, and I had stopped in the middle of my second redesign on the site. I’ve made $2.04 from this site in the past couple months, I think, so it wasn’t really on my list of priorities. The Smiley Creator page is kind of screwed up visually (but perfectly functional). Now that I’ve been served with the DMCA, I think I’ll take more notice of the site. Obviously EZ Smiley is seen as a threat to the multi-billion-dollar smiley industry, so I must have something special here.
Edit: I fixed a lot of the display issues. I still have to revamp the sidebar, though.
