Knit Addict

My husband’s camera takes great pictures.  I enjoy sharing them.  I won’t even gripe if you copy them and use them, especially if you give me credit for taking them.

I get just pissy about people stealing bandwidth though.

I checked my stats earlier and was astonished to see my number of visitors had skyrocketed.  Then I thought about Camp and all the interest and decided it wasn’t so surprising.  I thought I’d see what was getting the most play.  Turns out the most used image is this:

And when I checked the referrer info, I found a bodybuilding forum was pulling it.  I went hunting through the forum and found a…well…pretty disgusting thread that included a hot link to this image.  And a couple of responses that also pulled the image.

I had done some research before into how to serve up a different image (or no image at all) to anyone who hot linked to my images.  Hotlinking is using an image that’s served up somewhere else on your web page.  It’s done all the time by bloggers using flickr, etc.  Not a bad thing if it’s expected and permission is given.  I had looked into it when I found what appeared to be some really bad spanish-language poetry that hotlinked to an image of the moon that was also from the Maui trip.  I had never implemented it though, because it wasn’t a big deal.

The thread this was referenced by was disgusting enough for me to finally do something about it.

So now, if you hotlink to one of my images you’ll instead get an image that says:

Hotlinkers SUCK

Yes, I could have just served up the little broken link and called it good, but….well…. I wasn’t happy.

If you really would like to link to one of my images, and you’re not talking about women in a sexist, derogatory, nauseating manner leave me a comment with your site and I’ll allow you to pull images.

Otherwise - grow up and buy your own damn bandwidth.