Hello lovely readers,

I'm changing the license on the Harvest and Halloween pages to a Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license.

What the heck does that mean?

It means that if you want to reproduce/repost material from these portions of the site, you may do so, but only under a few conditions:

1) Your website is not commercial (if it is, please contact me for permission first)

2) You mention where you got it, and link back to Tacomamama.com

3) You can alter or build upon the content only if you also allow people to share your own content on your website.

What brought this on?

Someone reposted this entire page (complete with formatting) to their blog with no link and no mention of where it came from. Ouch! Seeing that was like a kick in the stomach. I'm not big on jumping up and down about copyright violations, but please link back to this site if you re-post something!

Do you think you're special or something?

Well, my mother always said so, but sometimes I have doubts....No, actually. This license is less restrictive than the usual copyright notice you see at the bottom of just about every page on the web. It's really never OK to just go ahead and re-post a whole page of someone's work without attribution. Some people get really mad about that sort of thing and start sending you scary cease and desist letters and stuff like that. The usual etiquette on the Internet is to stick to short quotes, at most, with a link back to the original page, unless something comes straight out of a press release or event announcement clearly intended for publication.

Bloggers support each other through the practice of linking. Search engines like Google assign the importance of websites in part according to how many other sites link to them. This is really important to the blogger, because it keeps her site from disappearing under a pile of other sites when people search for something she's blogged about.

What about the rest of the site?

Someday I'll dig into the guts of Geeklog and figure out how to change the licensing notice, but for now the Copyright notice is staying. Obviously, I didn't write all those events listings myself, and I don't mind if you copy and paste one for your own purposes. I'm really talking about the articles, pictures, whole pages of listings, and things like that.

To add a link to Tacomamama, copy and paste this into your blog post:


<a href="http://www.tacomamama.com">Tacomamama.com</a>

Thank you for reading Tacomamama, and I hope you like what you see enough to share it with others! Just make sure you remember to say where you got it.

- Jen