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Sunday, October 13, 2002

pissed off, hotlinking, and pornoclips
So, being the freak that I am, I like to check my stats daily to see how my bandwidth is going, and all that other stuff that us blogfreaks do (who's linking to me?, which days do I get the most hits? etc). Friday's stats showed 1.7 gigabytes of bandwidth used - WOAH! A year ago, that was a whole month for me. This morning, I checked and Saturday's usage was over 2gigs. Yikes! Late last night I had pulled the longer HOT HOUSE clip down, thinking I could still afford to share the shorter one. But then I noticed a HUGE number of pulls from some "discussion board" site. Now, some of you have teased me about my mock-complaints - "no one ever thanks me for posting the porno clips, boo-hoo" - so I figure I'll try not to do that anymore, even though I do like the occasional "thank-you" (sidenote: I got two very nice compliments about the unionsuit pic, and despite both being from partnered men, that was very cool and satisfied my need for attention, if only briefly). I've been asked several times why I only post the porno clips for 1-3 days, and before this month, one of the main reasons was bandwidth - I didn't want it getting out of hand, since I'd like the ability to share a lot more with regular readers, and not worry so much about folks Google-searching for "free gay porno clips" having access to that stuff a week or more after initially posting. Once Dreamhost upped my bandwidth to the incredible 25 gigs/month (about 830mb's/day, which is a shitload, man!), I figured I could relax, and leave clips up longer. (But no more than a week, since I need to keep some control over usage, and don't want search engines to pick up on those pages.) But I forgot about those evil "discussion boards" - and they always, ALWAYS "hot link" - using the actual URL of pic files on their own sites, therefore eating MY bandwidth. So I did what I've done in the past - which is I change the file names of the "stolen images" (hey, copy, save, and use your own bandwidth, no problem) - but I was still pissed, and tired of having to do this every few days when one of these discussion boards decides to steal images (sometimes it's merely to make fun of one of my self-pics, and i can take a joke, but sheeesh, download the picture, and host it your damn self already!) I had heard about commands, or whatever, that help prevent this, but always figured it's a pain in the ass to implement. It's not. If I could do it in a mere 15 minutes (and I mean from starting the GOOGLE search, to finding the right page, to generating the code, and uploading it to my site, and sending a thank-you email to the page that provided the code-generator) then anyone can. I had forgotten briefly that I still have stuff on Geocities (hssssssss!), so I had to accomodate for that, but it's real easy to do, I highly recommend everyone with their own webpage use the link above to prevent hotlinking. Rant (nearly) over.