Bandwidth Theft

Now that I've moved to my own domain and I'm much more aware of the bandwidth I'm using, I've started to take an active interest in seeing who is sending me traffic. Today, while browsing through my referrers, I came across a place that had posted several images from my site without any links back. This is known as bandwidth theft or "hot-linking", and it's a no-no.

After consulting various methods of stopping the theft, I attempted to implement one. Unfortunately, I messed up the code just a little. About that time, my younger brother contacted me from Germany, and I was occupied for ... awhile. Unbeknownst to me, the code was blocking all images from showing up, including on my own site, and substituting a "Bandwidth Theft" warning banner.

Ooops.

After I finished my discussion with my brother (happy birthday, D!) I noticed the problem and fixed it. However, some of you folks may have logged in during the... um... outage. The page looked very odd. I apologize for the mistake. It probably won't happen again. And now I have a good method for blocking sites that hot-link to my images. I'll be using that method in the future.

In other administration news, I've removed most of the images from my old URL, and will be putting up redirect pages soon. If you notice any broken links on THIS site, leading back to a location on eskimo.com, please let me know. I'm less than half done updating the blog entries... but those should make up the bulk of the broken links at this point.