Everything on the screen in design mode is drag and drop.  Resizing, adding features, functions and more.  I so wish my Lotus Domino based blog had this function as well.  If you have not seen Headway theme and run WordPress, take a look and let me know if you have questions.  It is much like Squarespace for those running their own WordPress.  Global changes and more are a click away.  The whole thing can be done behind the scenes before launching so no one sees the changes until you are ready in their safe mode.  Amazing stuff.

So stage #1 included the following and how:

• Highlight the screencasts.  I simply added a HTML leaf and embedded the code.  I drug the edge for sizing and saved.  Done.
• Show the featured posts prominently.  I added a featured posts leaf and set the number to rotate through.  Set to fluid height and to use the excerpt. Done.
• Change the sidebar.  Partially done.  I am playing with the order and will move the Archive links to the Archive page shortly.

Stage 2 will redo the banner and small advertisements I run to support the site.  It will also finish the social integration points.  I kept the coloring easy and simple in stage 1.  Separated the sections better and hopefully made getting to content faster.

Look for a change to the SpikedStudio page as well very shortly as the new SpikedStudio channel has launched on YouTube to bring all the content into one place and another presence.  TheSocialNetworker and IdoNotes is there.  NotesIn9 makes it’s appearance soon too.

Once before I had content taken from EverythingTwitter and republished.  The author of that blog responded promptly and sent a wonderful apology letter explaining that they were unaware of how the plugin was working and posting the content without attribution to the source.

However, it has struck once again.  I noticed it a few weeks ago on a new site that was registered June 15 2009 under the name TwitTrix.com with the registrant/administrative and technical contact being in England.  The site itself was registered in Jun of 2009, and content started appearing soon after.

With the current tools available for aggregation, it is tempting to take non-attributed and linked content for easy republication.  This moves beyond aggregation and into copyright issues.

Bloggers work hard for unique and valuable content, and often rush to be the first to have an article posted on a subject.  With this comes the responsibility of finding the right sources to give you ideas and generate topics, not a full copy/paste or import.

Some sites have taken a firm stance on how to deal with someone on their service that might have copyright material, like Blogger by Google.  While those of us that find content on self hosted servers do not have much leverage except to ask first.

So I turned to some sites that offer suggestions and advice on how bloggers can protect their content.  Plagiarism Today had 5 steps each blogger should take to protect content.  I suggest we all get to reading.  DailyBlogTips also had 12 Do’s and Don’t to follow which were good to add to the list.

Finally the place where I go to begin to even grasp how to blog effectively, ProBlogger and his excellent articles.  Including this one on protecting your content.

I gave thought to this for some time before just swapping out years of content and starting from scratch, but I hit some walls with integration and ease of change from an administrators point of view.  Yes, many of the awesome Lotus developers can make sweeping changes, even bringing WordPress templates into the Domino blog database, but you are left with a shell from that point on.

I also decided on the Headway theme.  Full drag and drop placement, draggable resizing and incredible theme control.  If you decide to grab it, tell them I sent you for sure.

Look for a bunch of posts queued up on the recent Social Media Business Forum as well as some other topics on my mind.  Also, do not forget this is the beginning of a monthly newsletter (visit the homepage to sign up) with more in depth commentary and some surprises along the way.