![core77_milan_coffee1[3]_2](http://blog.wisefaq.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/core77-milan-coffee13-2.gif "core77_milan_coffee1[3]_2")
I was chuffed that someone linked to my “What coffee drink is that” post. I first saw the chart at another blog, so I grabbed a copy of it. My post wasn’t that great, but I liked the chart. So did someone else. They linked directly to the image on my server.
The thieving bastard.
2 reasons to direct link (hot link) to a image:
- save bandwidth on your server, as the web browser will load the image from someone elses server, and/or
- you’re a lazy bastard.
So what this meant was that every visitor to their website, was downloading the image from my website., and they didn’t know it.
It wasn’t that this thieving bastard couldn’t store the image on his blogger site. He was just lazy.
I can now understand why Andy was so peeved (link NSFW). And while Andy’s BBC image is a good one, I’ve decided to show this image to hotlink-ers:
The technical jiggery-pokery is done by modifying .htaccess to block hotlinking.
Instructions to do that can be found here:
How to Embarrass RSS Scrapers Who Hotlink to Your Images
Years ago when I was dealing with this, I used to offload the traffic by redirecting to a random image search on Altavista. Cheeky, but Altavista had more bandwidth than I did. Used to confuse the hell out of the bastards. Amusingly, it turned up porn more often than any other type of image – and a different image every time!
Altavista was truely a great search engine in it’s day.
And you’re right, I searched for the phrase “hot coffee”, and Altavista returned an image from the infamous GTA ‘hot coffee’ mode, as the first hit.