Surprise Suprise

mid-afternoon on Tuesday, the 13th of December 2005 by Chad

I’m talking about the practice of hotlinking. This is where people use images off of your website directly into their pages, instead of copying your image to their server.

In effect, every page that loads from their site gets its pictures from yours. They get free bytes from your service, without the end user having to be bothered with ever seeing your site.

It’s an annoying practice. If I didn’t have my own server hosting my site, I might be tight on how much bandwidth I have available each month. And if I went over, I’d have to pay because someone else couldn’t be bothered with just putting the image on their own page.

I don’t mind when you put a hyperlink around the image itself to point back to the source site of the image. That’s cool and I like that. But it doesn’t hardly ever happen.

But people have been hotlinking a lot of my images in the past few months. So, I finally did something about it. And it’s funny. What is great is that the original image is cached on their workstation typically, so they’ll never see anything weird about what the picture actually looks like to an end user.

But the first person to load the site clean, well, they’ll get a different image than the one they expected. Warning: this image is funny but a little bit dirty. Thankfully, I couldn’t find the original image I was planning on using.

Gennie is also having the same problem, but with audio files, which eat up quite a bit more…