There is not much that makes me more angry than creating artificial barriers to exit for the purpose of forcing clients to stay with you.  Godaddy is a prime example of this.  It is a huge pain to move a website and all the files away from them.

I have a client who has outgrown Godaddy’s hosting and I am moving them over to MediaTemple, who provides scalable hosting for high traffic and database intensive websites.

The site is made up of four open source web based applications:

1. WordPress for content management
2. OpenX for banner advertisement serving
3. phpBB for web forums
4. Gallery2 for a photo gallery

Each of these applications has a separate file structure and an individual database on Godaddy.  Much of the content has been uploaded to the application and the easiest way to move the site would be to Zip or Tar the entire site, backup the databases and move the files over to the new hosting.  I have probably done this thirty times in my life.  It is pretty straight forward and most of the time is spent watching files transfer.

Godaddy has made this impossible for the following reasons.

(more…)

Let’s see the AP try and put this genie back in the barn or the horse back in the bottle.

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090204/ap_en_ot/obama_poster

The funny thing is the creator of the poster, also create the “Obey” brand which was started using a bootlegged photo of Andre The Giant.  Shepard Fairey, the creator, has been on both sides of the copyright issue, and has tried to protect his images from duplication.

I wish I still  had the bootleg Radar has a posse, 1′ 4″ sticker that the previous tenants left in the rental home I moved into in 1998.  The sticker was made for the neighborhood cat “Radar,” and included an image of a cat.  One of my favorite version is the UNC-CH t-shirt for Jackie Manual.

There is a long discussion of the techniques and law here: www.myartspace.com/blog/2009/01/shepard-fairey-obey-copyright.html