Linking
Feel free to link to any page you like. That’s what hypertext is for. I request that you not link directly to images because images are dead ends—the only place you can go from an image is the Back button, so effectively, you’re using the image on your own site (see the next section). But any actual page is fair game, and it would be silly of me to tell you otherwise.
Images
Most of these images have been scanned from comics published by DC Comics. Technically, you probably shouldn’t copy them any more than I should have posted them. But I’m not exactly in a position to say “don’t copy these images that I, uh, well...copied.” However, I do have a request: Please save a copy and upload it to your own website! If you simply use an <img...> tag and point it to this site, that means every time someone looks at your page it puts extra load on my site, and uses up some of my bandwidth.
I have been known to move images around from time to time.
Another advantage to saving your own copy: I’ve optimized most of these to appear against a light-colored background. If your site has a dark or brightly colored background... well, it might not look very good. If you save your own copy, you can modify it to look right. If you ask me, and I still have a copy of the original cleaned-up scan, I may even have time to create one optimized for your background.
Text
Now, the text is my own work, with very few exceptions (and I think I’ve labeled all of those). So I can unambiguously say: don’t rip it off. If you’d like to use one of my write-ups somewhere, ask me. Depending on what you intend to use it for I may be quite happy to let you post it (with attribution, of course).
Advertising
If you have to ask me to run an ad, chances are I won’t. There are several reasons for this:
- I don’t like flashy (no pun intended) ads, and I’m sure most of you don’t either.
- This is a reference site, so I don’t want to send people off to completely irrelevant places.
- I don’t want the legal implications of making any significant amount of money from a site about other people’s work. Though DC has been fairly tolerant of fan sites of late, there were times in the late 1990s when lawyers sent nastygrams to fan sites. I’m reasonably certain that everything here is legal under fair use, but I don’t want to be on the wrong end of a lawsuit to prove it.
So what you will see are buttons in the sidebar, and a couple of banners on the home page, linking to sites that I personally want to promote. Sites like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, or the Hero Initiative, or the Firefox and Opera web browsers. And there are a couple of places where I’ve linked to pages on Amazon.com using my associate link. (I figure I’ll probably only make something like $1.25 a year, but it’s an experiment.)
What you won’t see are big, annoying ads that cover things up and link to some random site that has nothing to do with the Flash (yes, I know Firefox isn’t related to the Flash, but alternative web browsers are important to me), or ads run just because someone offered to pay me.
Reciprocal Links
If you want me to link to your site, it’s got to fit the following criteria:
- It’s relevant to the Flash, or to comics in general.
- It’s interesting or informative.
- It doesn’t require me to switch browsers and/or computers to view it.
- It doesn’t look spammy.
I know the last one’s subjective, but if your site looks like it’s been set up solely to maximize its keyword scores in Google, I’m going to skip it. If your email looks like it was generated by some tool that didn’t look at anything beyond keyword matches on my site, I probably won’t look at yours. (If you’re reading this, you’re way ahead of the game compared to some of the link swap spam I get.)
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