Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Well, I was all ready to get down and get busy on a new feature for the web site today when I discovered another person leeching a picture from the site.
Really, it's flattering to think that someone finds use from the motley collection of items here on the site, but I'd appreciate it if people wouldn't hotlink. Copy the picture if you want. Better yet, give credit. Even better, ask permission AND give credit.
Just because you some free space on some community site doesn't mean that the rest of the Internet comes to you for free. I have to pay to host those pictures.
I spent a chunk of the day researching ways to prevent hotlinking. My site isn't hosted on Apache, so tricks that those sites use won't work for me. Besides, those things tend to slow down serving up images for people who do take the time to visit and enjoy. I know that some of our site visitors are on dial-up, and I hate to make the experience worse. While this journal is fairly high bandwidth with the pictures, I've tried to keep the rest of the site dial-up friendly.
I found one thing that will work - as soon as the hosting service upgrades to the next version of the web server. Sigh. Works great on my local server, which just happens to be the latest version.
Now it's 4:30 and I haven't done a thing except track down the thief and and replace the image with a friendly note stating that we'd like to have the budget to serve up even more stuff, but can't if people keep leeching our bandwidth. I actually found that this image was being served up on more than one web site. We'll see what happens.
I mean, I could have been nasty and sent 'em an offensive image, but that's not my style. Generally speaking, people tend to react better to gentle reminders. We'll see what happens.
Perhaps I'll have a little time before dinner to start on the new web content.
Man. I was finally starting to feel better, and I had to waste the whole day on this mess.
Tags: Technology