I was involved in the case involving Carlos 'Storm' Martinez, who is an amazing post sound mixer and a stand-up guy. I am a little perturbed to see him mentioned on the site. The design of the site in question was good, no doubt, but it was also riddled with a stolen Neutraface2 font face and the HTML didn't validate. And there was no RoR backend; the whole site was hosted on a GoDaddy shared server. From my understa…
I certainly do not blame Mr. Gillentine for the numerous errors he made in the above post since most of this was just regurgitated from what he heard from Mr. Martinez, but unfortunately, almost everything he said was wrong. I have very clear documented evidence that this is so, which is why I won the court case. Let's take it point by point.
- The font was licensed
- It was written in html5, cross-browser tested, and worked perfectly
- Mr. Martinez's previous site was hosted on a godaddy shared server, and that site was made by Mr. Gillentine. Since I know godaddy hosting is horrible, I switched his hosting to FatCow before putting up the site. So not only was this inaccurate, but Mr. Gillentine is the culprit for his own criticism.
- The site was not delivered late, and my price wasn't doubled. I charged hourly, and made the rate clear in the contract that Mr. Martinez signed. I have documents in which he says that his time constraints are "asap", and that he doesn't have budget constraints. No final price was ever discussed, I just recorded my hours worked, put them on an invoice, and sent it.
- What Mr. Gillentine did was attempt to steal the site for Mr. Martinez by removing the stolen notice and re-hosting it on his own servers. Whenever you find yourself ripping someone's html and hosting it on your own website (much like Curebit did to 37signals), you must know that you are clearly doing something wrong. And yes, if you find someone trying to steal your work, you do typically send them an aggressive note telling them to take it down. And it worked.
- There was a rails back end, it was hosted elsewhere because (as I assume most people here know) you need a different server setup to handle a rails environment. The other host was mapped to a subdomain on the site.
- I never took down the site. In fact, I didn't even have access to the site, since Mr. Martinez tried to change all his hosting passwords and steal the site from me (that was why I triggered the stolen notice). Mr. Martinez took his own site down and parked his domain because it was better than facing the embarrassment of having a huge notice over your site telling everyone that you are a thief. I would have loved to have that notice stay up for longer.
- I have no "history of posting complaints about how I have been screwed out of $500 and then taking them down". This is 100% baseless, and makes no sense, I don't even know where he came up with this. Everything I post has and will stay up until I receive payment.
- I have spent, by my estimates, about 30 minutes in total telling this story over the web. In fact, I would assume that Mr. Gillentine's time "web-stalking" the issue far exceeded my time spreading the word about it. The bulk of my time spent on damages from this was spent waiting around in the courthouse, which takes forever.
And for the person who asked below, I did win the court case, I have the court order saying he has to pay me, and it has been over a month and I still have literally not heard a word from him. I didn't want to have to call the police, and I even reached out to his friends to ask them to put me in contact with him so I didn't have to do this, and they said no. Too bad.