This is something that I think I’ll be using more regularly. It’s called Spreeder and it trains you to read faster. Just paste in a bunch of text and choose your specifics and it will flash the words right in front of your face. Pretty seamless. I like it.
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Live in Victoria? Want to show your Schoolr support? Come down to UVic (in front of the McPherson Library) anytime between 1:00PM-3:00PM on Tuesday, December 1st.
Hubert will be there…breakdancing.
Rewind back a few weeks. There I was, at home, waiting for my clothes to come out of the dryer. With twenty minutes to spare, I sat at my desk wearing my best laundry day attire: blue basketball shorts from the ninth grade, a significantly undersized t-shirt, and black socks. Had I showered yet? Perhaps.
To fill the time, I started to look through Schoolr’s referral logs. What are referral logs? Basically, they tell you where your site was visited from. For example, if you’re on Facebook and you visit Schoolr, the log would tell me that you were referred by Facebook. Pretty standard. As I’m going through the logs, one site catches my eye and I click onto it. It’s called SchoolWax and it was strikingly similar to Schoolr in both look and function (especially the previous version of Schoolr). The first thought I had was, “This sucks, they liked my site and copied it for themselves.” Thing is, design elements can’t be copyrighted and without having solid proof, I wasn’t able to prove anything. See the similarities here.
That is, until I viewed their source code. I saw that they had directly copied a part of my source code and put it on their site. This made it very clear that the existence of their site was based on Schoolr and took their site from “made something similar” to “copied code and function.” See copied code here.
I dug deeper and found out that SchoolWax is run by Etraffic Solutions, a large e-learning corporation based out of Victoria, British Columbia.
Feeling a bit cheated as SchoolWax had used my content to promote and sell Etraffic’s products, form partnerships with organizations, and as a means of publicity, I decided to consult a couple of lawyers. They were very helpful but also very expensive. Being a student, I don’t have a litigation budget, so I decided to deal with this on my own.
I sent Etraffic Solutions a letter establishing that they were infringing on my copyright. It contained 3 requests:
Read my letter to them here.
I also had their source code notarized, so that they couldn’t remove my code, or references to it, and claim it was never there.
Look at the notarized document here.
I received a response from Etraffic’s lawyers. The letter did not address my main complaint (that my source code on their website showed they copied Schoolr), rather, it focused on minute, general information, that I did not bring up. Here are some snippets from the letter and my responses to them.
From the letter: “While the reference to a public website, www.schoolr.com can only be seen when viewing the code behind Etraffic’s website, the reference to your website has now been removed by Etraffic.”
My response: So they’re saying that they did copy my code but that it’s not a big deal because it could ONLY be seen in the source code (and it’s not like the source code makes up the website…).
From the letter: “The reference to www.schoolr.com served no purpose within the Etraffic code and conveyed no advantage to Etraffic.”
My response: Of course the reference to Schoolr served them no purpose. It was foolish of them to replicate my site and even more foolish to copy and paste my code into theirs. I am not questioning the existence of this one line of code (that I originally had linked to Schoolr as a quick fix to a bug). I am questioning the fact that a) they based SchoolWax after Schoolr and b) they copied my code onto their site.
From the letter: “Both www.schoolr.com and www.schoolwax.com legaly access the citation functionality of the North Carolina State University website as do a number of other websites.”
My response: Of course they do. I never questioned this and this is not my complaint. North Carolina State University offers a fantastic citation resource and I encourage more research websites to utilize their brilliant tool.
From the letter: “Etraffic has not violated any copyright, nor made any revenue as a result of your website being referenced five times. Etraffic has removed any reference to your website and now considers the matter to be closed.”
My response: Once again, their wording is impeccable. According to this, they haven’t made any specific revenue from my code being “referenced” five times. How about the revenue that was generated as a result of SchoolWax copying Schoolr? That is where this code comes into play, as proof that they did more than “reference” my code but rather copied Schoolr and sloppily left a trail. And, as far as I’m concerned, this matter is not “closed.”
Read their letter here.
You all rock.
It was pretty annoying, I know. Every time you changed a tab (went from Google to Images or from Wikipedia to Thesaurus, etc.) you would have to click the text box to write something. Not anymore. Now, your cursor is always in the text box, no matter what tab you click.
Update: So I made it super clickable but as a result it messed up everything under ‘more stuff’. So I’ve temporarily disabled the function until I figure it all out but it will be back.
One of the cool things about Schoolr is the fact that no matter what computer you use, you always have your homepage with you. It’s always the same, just type in the address.
Delicious works on the same premise. Besides being a social bookmarking site, which I don’t really use it as, it allows you to save all your bookmarks to the web - don’t worry, you have the option to keep them private. So no matter what computer you’re using, you’ll always have access to them. I use it to bookmark journals/articles I find when I’m doing research on the library computers. Do it.
This blog has been a long time coming. Schoolr originally had one but it died of neverupdatetitis. Not this time, though. I simply won’t let that happen again.
So what’s the point of all this? I’ll be updating you on the life of Schoolr. Yeah, sometimes there won’t be a lot to say but I’ll try to keep it interesting by sharing other web resources with you. I can promise you now that this won’t be a diary. I won’t be sharing my emotions, or my lunch, with you.
A picture a fan posted on the “Schoolr is why I’m hot” Facebook group.
After Schoolr was first made, I constantly pestered my friends for suggestions and they gave me lots of them. The site started to take shape and I wanted to get the word out. How? I convinced my friend to put on a giant chicken costume.
So on December 25th 2006, we took to the malls. My friend in a giant chicken costume, another with a video camera, and myself. After being escorted out of two malls by security because video cameras and, apparently, giant chickens are against the rules, we called it and decided to try again the next day. By the way, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing a grown man in a security uniform chasing a giant chicken outside of a Toys”R”Us.
December 26th was more promising. My friend, who wore the chicken costume the day before, couldn’t make it, so another friend volunteered. We decided to skip the malls and positioned ourselves on a busy street corner. Everyone was great and loved the chicken, who eventually took on the name Hubert. Hubert was pretty sexy, so sexy that A Channel News did a segment on Schoolr (you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMj5g8LAN_E).
^Hubert and some fans. Know who these girls are? Tell them to contact me and I’ll dedicate a Schoolr slogan to them.
Schoolr was made because I’m the king of procrastination and because I was fed up with how I did research online. So instead of writing a paper one night, I made the site.
The idea is simple: instead of going to a bunch of different sites to look things up, go to one and do it all from there.
The naming process was really simple. What is the site for? School. What does it help with? Research. So, Schoolr is the baby of school and research.
Schoolr was launched in December of 2006. Yeah, it has been almost 3 years.