A Single Southern Guy in America

June 16, 2004

It's that time again

I should have known when I saw her on Letterman. I should have known when people started coming to the blog searching for Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie in various Southern states. I should have known when I saw the promos for "The Simple Life 2."

Ever since our friend Sugarmama noted that she was afraid I might have developed into some kind of strange Paris Hilton fan because I would occasionally post about her and my pictures with her, I have tried to refrain from discussing "That Girl." Last December while the series was airing and in the weeks leading up to it and after it was over, I watched the search engine hits move up from traffic looking for those two girls. And today, it had hist again. Folks are out there looking for Paris, and, sadly for them, they're finding me.

I'll give you a hint--if you want your traffic to jump up a bit, write about those two girls, put links on their names, and be sure to use the word 'pics.' You will see a spike soon after the search engines have crawled your site.

My question is something I hope a techie out there can help me with. How can you keep people from linking directly to images on your site and thereby stealing your bandwidth? And, how can you track down people who are doing that? I can see the train coming again and I'm ready to slow it down this time.

Posted by Adam H at June 16, 2004 10:42 PM ~ Link Cosmos | Trackbacks (0)

Comments

I'm not sure about your hosting company, but the cPanel on Hosting Matters has a feature you can enable to block that out which works in either an alternate image showing for all attempts to hotlink to any images on your site or just causes them not to work and show a red X.

Posted by: Jeff at June 16, 2004 10:57 PM

I'm a techie, so I'll help you. You keep people from linking directly to your images of Paris Hilton by taking the pictures down. Spikes in bandwidth shouldn't have any effect on your ego unless they are people coming to read your own writing instead of looking for a picture of someone else.

Posted by: sugarmama at June 17, 2004 09:37 AM

check out your cPanel, it should have a hotlink feature there. to track, use your cPanel again, or any "counter" software to track your current hits. your cPanel has a simple counter which tracks where most of your traffic is coming from. from there, you can tell who has taken, and replace those particular jpg files with jpg files that say loving things like, "i am a hotlinking jackass", or you know, less polite things. let me know if you need help.

Posted by: alianora at June 19, 2004 01:58 PM

From one single Arkansan to another, the following link explains how to do it. It is pretty tech heavy but you should be able follow it step by step.

http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html

Posted by: jon at June 25, 2004 01:12 AM

i don't know that not putting the pictures up would help since its your picture, but the switching pictures helps to stop the ones who've done it and putting a sign up to others helps as well. just plainly state when people come to visit your page.. maybe on the sidebar at the bottom that you don't support bandwidth theft and you do replace pictures with others anytime you find out its being hotlinked.

if you dont mind people taking the photos and uploading to their own server, be sure to say that. i tell people just ask me and ill be sure to help them out.

also, you might want to get the script code for disabling the right click option on your page so no one can right click a pic and click properties. of course there are other ways, but disabling the right click stops most would-be thieves.

my right click comes with a simple message. visit and try it :) its fun.

wishin ya a good day, i like your place.

-stank

Posted by: stank at August 4, 2004 06:24 AM