Category: Websites

Hotlink Prevention

Like most website owners who pay for their own servers, I’ve run into the problem of image files being hotlinked on other websites without permission, resulting in the bandwidth I paid for being used for their benefit.

Fortunately, there are many solutions to this problem, particularly the advice given on hotlink prevention at A List Apart.

I’ve implemented the suggestions they’ve made almost exactly, though I did have to make two changes. The first involves changing a line in the showpic.php file from <img src="/<?php echo($pic); ?>" alt="Image"> to <img src="<?php echo($pic); ?>" alt="Image">, as the leading / caused some url directory issues.

The second change involved adding options +followsymlinks to the top of my .htaccess file because server had it off by default, causing and error with the RewriteRule directive.

Otherwise, everything seems to be running perfectly, and anyone accessing those images either through a direct link, viewing this website, or through the RSS feeds should have no problem viewing the images, while any attempts to hotlink from an unauthorized external will return a simple http error, resulting in less bandwidth loss.

However, if you have any problems with viewing images here, please let me know.

Collective Multidirectional Links

The co-link project, created by Alex Primo and developed by Ricardo Araújo, is an interesting idea in making website links dynamic connection points that can be easily modified by the site’s user community.

As this demonstration shows, visitors can add targets to a javascript-based list of target URLs that opens when any text link is clicked on.

Of course there are some downsides to this rethinking of the standard static hypertext link, such as the current lack of moderation. Obviously any links that can be modified by any member of the public would result in several pages of spam links nearly overnight, requiring some form of moderation, be it automated, manual or simply limiting users to those registered and approved by the site maintainer.

Another problem is that the ability for users to add unmoderated links to the list does nothing to indicate the relevance of those targets to the link text parent.

For example, if the author is writing about the politics of blogging and links to the appropriate section of wikipedia, one gets a good idea of what the author intended with that link. If visitors add links to essays and opinion pieces on the same topic, the value of that link is enhanced. If, however, visitors misunderstand the link to be about anything blog related and add everything from links to free blogging sites to blog technology pieces, they can quickly crowd out the more relevant links.

Still, the co-links project is an interesting experimental take on the static hypertext link, so it’s worth checking out to see if they can overcome these problems.

FirefoxOpera

If you’re one of the millions of people who use Firefox, the free alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, you probably know that the open-source web browser has a extension for nearly any browsing need you might have.

FirefoxOpera shows just how far you can take your customization by showing you how to download and install Firefox extensions and plugins that will give you many of the features made available by the Opera web browser.

Review your corporate hate

Forbes.com has an article up now in which they rate and review what they consider the top corporate hate sites, such as paypalsucks.com and walmart-blows.com.

Obviously the Internet has plenty of other corporate hate sites, such as my personal favorites bestbuysux.org and ihateblockbuster.com, but it’s a good introduction to such sites for many consumers who might not even know about them. Several sites also include an area for employee complaints as well.

Like many websites on the web, however, you have to look at what you’re reading with a critical eye. For every legitimate complaint by a customer, there’s the possibility of entries that have been “embellished” by irrational consumers with unreasonable demands that even the best of corporations could not meet. Additionally, one has to consider that in general it’s only customers with complaints that are willing to respond to such sites, leaving a silent number of reasonably happy customers.

In the end, however, such websites do provide a valuable service in at least allowing legitimately wronged customers to publicly vent even if their complaints go unheard by the corporate management.