Website links being stopped

Why would they do that to you. you worked on the sites they should give you credit. I actuly wonder if this is against the law.

As for the help you could try redirecting it through another domain. maybe on a free server.

When you work for someone you really don't have a legal right to the work that you did for *them* under their employ.

The *company* is the holder of the copyright...not thier individual employees.

You *might* get permission to post screen shots with no links to working sites, but that would up to your former employer to decide.

It all comes under 'creating works for hire' or something like that. I'd remove the links, otherwise you could find youreslf in court on copyright infringement charges. You don't want that!

Read about this at the US Copyright office site.

They are most likely going off of the Referring Page to setect that the links are coming from you. In firefox, with the Web Developer toolbar, http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/, you can disable the referrer from being sent. Try this. If the links then work, then you know that is what they are doing.

If they are actively watching you, it is going to be difficult get around this for more than a day. I actively watch our competition's activity on our web sites. Twice a day (once in the morning and once in the afternoon) they visit our site. For about 3 days they never visited, I almost sent them a "Get Well Soon" card as a joke (Why do we monitor, becasue we have watched in the past as we add something new to our site, and a day or two later they add it to their site, and then even go as far as to tell people we took that from their site. So we treasure log files

If the sites you are talking about were done for a your old company's clients, and not a site belonging to the client itself, you might be able to ask the site themselves if you can post a screenshot of their page and link to them.

However, DISCLAIMER, seek legal advice on any contract you may have had in place while employed (specifically regarding contacting clients). I have in the past signed agreements that state that for a certain period after end of contract I cannot contact any clients and/or vendors, (and even other employees or former employees)

So again, if you had any type of contact check it out first.

-Greg

It's a hard issue really. Setting links I think is totally legit, and there is no reason you shouldn't be allowed to, and there is no law that says they should be allowed to block you.

The screenshots on the other hand would fall under copyright violations to a certain extent. Though you generated the screenshot, if you take a picture of a copyrighted work, it's still illegal to resell that, ei video taping a movie.

You mentioned that you even went to their site via Yahoo and it was blocked. That seems a little improbable, considering for them to do that, they'd have to block Yahoo traffic, and they probably aren't going to do that (Google as well, etc). I am tempted to think it is another issue, perhaps you could post their links for us to take a closer look? Thanks.

Or maybe the site/page doesn't exist anymore?

Personally, I would just post a image of the site.

But if they request that you take that down, you might be legally obligated to do so.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. The posting of a screenshot scares me I don't need any legal problems. I had no contract with them so I can do whatever I want, I am not mis-representing that these are my clients, I am saying these are sites I have worked on whitch it totaly true.

The Yahoo links thing we used for awhile was this, say I wanted to link to Ebay.com. Rather than make the link go to h**p://www.ebay.com, it was set to go to h**p://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=ebay/v=2/SID=e/TID=F553_74/l=WS1/R=1/SS=13127727/IPC=us/SHE=0/H=1/SIG=118v86j77/EXP=1118411964/*-http://www.ebay.com/ but now they block those somehow, not from yahoo or any other site, just from mine.

I thought about spoofing the http-referer but don't know how I might do that within the code of the page....does anyone else?

I'm not sure how well this would work, but you could try linking to Google's cache of the site.

Here's a link to tandswebdesign.com:

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:HZ8ZSOHLFtYJ:www.tandswebdesign.com/+&hl=en

I'm not sure if that's the exact format used, but you can always just type the URL into Google's search box, click Search, then click Show Google's Cache.

UPDATE:

Just reread the text on the top of the cached page. They do provide a static link up at the top. The one for tandswebdesign was this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:HZ8ZSOHLFtYJ:www.tandswebdesign.com/+&hl=en

Maybe you should look and see if youve got any legal options. It seems your pages are done by you through your imagination, and the company hasnt paid for your services yet... intellectual property rights could be key...

another alternative to googled cached copies is to use the ones from http://www.archive.org (use their wayback machine), however they take a while to get sites on there.

Myself, personally for my own sites, I'm always for the idea that "it's my site, I can let whoever I want see it" There are sites out there that have differnet content based on where you are, what broswer you have, etc. It's just different content based upon your location.

-Greg