Some people are cool. Take “defective yeti”:http://www.defectiveyeti.com for instance. They posted a link to the dancing banana that I found elsewhere and posted. They made a local copy of the image (as I did), posted it on the site, and even posted a link to where he saw it on my site. I’ve had a metric shitload of visitors from DY here over the past few days (hi folks, take off your snowshoes and stay a while) because of that link. That’s “cool” in my lexicon.

The link is friendly, but the part that makes it good citizenship in my mind is the local copy. See, if he had instead posted an <IMG> tag directly at my copy of the image, it would have looked just the same, nobody would have been the wiser. But I would have been “charged” for it, since it would use up my bandwidth from my hosting provider. See? Friendly.

Unlike “these”:http://pickle.fleegan.com/forum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=21 “mouth-breathers”:http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Schmoopy. They did what is called “deep-linking”, or posted an <IMG> tag directly at my copy. So, they have a free dancing banana on their site, courtesy of me. Uncool. Sure, the dancing banana weighs in at a hefty 1,773 bytes. That’s not about to break the budget. What was a little more bothersome was when I posted my 720p vs. 480p NBA2K3 comparison pictures on my site and “this knucklehead”:http://pub6.ezboard.com/fgamerszone64493frm15.showMessage?topicID=956.topic deep-linked every picture in a game forum. These images were on the order of 120k a piece, for a total of around a megabyte per view of this page. During the first week I had around 1,200 views of that forum post, for a gigabyte of traffic. Deep-linked. On my dime. Unacceptable.

So, that’s a very long introduction to a solution. Luc Latulippe posted a really high-quality primer on how to prevent deep-linking and even right-clicking to save (which I don’t need, really, since I don’t have anything I wish to prevent from being copied). If you’re having deep-linking problems and you’re not a genius like “Mark”:http://diveintomark.org who has entire legions of .htaccess rules standing guard over your site, get to reading. Thanks Luc.

P.S.

now listening to Korn::Life Is Peachy::A.D.I.D.A.S.

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