A couple of years back I worked freelance for a site called gunaxin.com. The arrangment lasted a couple of months, tops. In that time they published 5 articles I put together. Today, I was working up a resume with my writing experience and publishing history. So I went back to gunaxin.com to link those articles for said resume. They are all credited to some guy named Eugene Ritterspaugh. This is the second time since the end of the freelance arrangment that my work has been misattributed by gunaxin.com. The first time they had my articles listed as by admin@gunaxin.com. I sent an email to Phil and he assured me it would be corrected, and invited me to come back freelance again.
I was working on Never Saw It Coming
at the time and honestly did not have the time to devote to writing for gunaxin.com.Don't get me wrong, Phil was a great editor, a vitural anti-F-Bomb missile defense system and taught me alot about setting up a blog and formating posts for the right impact. He is an all around a great guy and gunaxin.com is a great place to go for a laugh.
But as a writer seeking to get my foot in the door, I need my previous work to be properly credited. So this week I will be reposting the articles I did for Gunaxin, here, so I can be assured that my work is credited to me. Check back this week, I'll have one up a day. Also, I jumped feet first into 2008 and finally set up a twitter account, feel free to look me up here.
Mike,
ReplyDeleteSorry for the confusion. I haven't come up with a good way to handle this situation. The theme automatically attributes articles to the account they are associated with. In order to ease my management burden, I try to get rid of accounts after a year of inactivity. At that point the articles were re-assigned to the Admin account. I had already made that change before I realized the issue it would cause to former writers who want their names to remain on articles.
I've searched for an alternate solution on that, and haven't found anything. Recently I was doing some reading about SEO, where it stated that posts should have a real name on them, and not admin (for better search traffic via google). That is when I added the fake name Eugene Ritterspauch to the Admin account. When I saw your complaint, I realized again this was stupid of me. So I've since edited the theme with some code which allows me to just remove the by line for any post that is owned by Admin. Not ideal I know, but better then putting the wrong name on it.
If you send me a list of your post urls, I will add an attribute with your name at the bottom. I would do this for all the posts by former writers, but unfortunately I don't have any record of who originally wrote them. Entirely my fault I understand, and from now on I'll add the note to the bottom of the posts before I remove the accounts.
Phil,
ReplyDeleteI'll get that list to you ASAP. You also may want to put up a public notice to your past contributers to do the same.
I write for the enjoyment and to amuse myself. If I can make someone think, laugh, or facepalm, I've done my job well in my own opinion. It's never been about money for me. If a reader has half as much fun reading my work, as I did writing it, then they had a great time. Just the same, when I put my writing in the public realm, I'd like the readers to know who wrote it. Thanks.