By the way, one other thing I found in looking at the stats of my blog site is that a lot of people are hotlinking to images from my site. “Hotlinking” refers to the practice of “borrowing” images on other people’s web site to adorn your own. This is not about downloading an image from somewhere else and uploading it to your own site. Instead, it is the practice of leaving the image on the other person’s web site, and by using simple HTML code, making the photo appear to be located on your own site–but really it’s located on the original site, and every time someone visits your site, their browser takes a covert side trip to the site with the photo, snags the image, and plops it into the hotlinker’s page, as if it were really located there.

Probably the hotlinkers do a Google image search, find a photo from my site there without ever visiting it, and then use the URL of the image where they like. In doing this, anyone can display a photo on their web page, even though the photo is hosted by someone else. But the Internet is not really free, as much as it may seem like it sometimes. To host an image–that is, to keep an image file on a web server hard disk–costs money. Similarly, to transmit data, like the image file, is called “bandwidth,” and also costs money. In other words, they’re paying the rent and transportation, which you’re hijacking to your benefit. While it may not be fully honest to grab someone else’s image and put it up on your site, at least you’re paying the rent and bus fare. Hotlinkers steal everything.

Some people hotlink to images because they feel they have no choice, like Blogspot bloggers who can’t upload images–or that is, they couldn’t before, but now they can but haven’t learned that yet. Others maybe can’t upload images from whatever service they’re using.

Either way, it comes down to this: if you use someone else’s URL in your image tag so they host the picture but it shows up on your site, then you’re stealing bandwidth. It means that in order for your page to look good, I have to pay my web host x number of dollars for hosting the image and using bandwidth so people who visit your site can see it. It’s like my using your phone line to make all the calls I like. But people do it casually probably because they don’t understand what they’re doing–or perhaps they do understand but just don’t care.

I tried to engage something called “hotlink prevention,” which would prevent such bandwidth theft, but as a result, many people with some browsers were not able to see the images I put up on my own blog, so that had to go. What I am left with is detecting which photos have been hotlinked, renaming each photo so affected, and then re-editing my own blog post which used the image so that the new name is recognized; that severs the link to the hijacker’s site while keeping the photo visible on my own site. Sometimes, if I am sufficiently annoyed by someone costing me a lot of bandwidth, I’ll change the name of the original and reflect that in my blog, but then I will also place a new image with the original file name–with a replacement image carrying a sharp graphic message telling the hotlinker to stop stealing bandwidth. They probably didn’t figure that (a) I would be able to see that they stole the image, or (b) I could change the image and in so doing, change their site.

Recently, one image in particular has been hotlinked a lot, one I grabbed from a Simpsons episode. At least three different forum/member sites had this image hotlinked; one of those sites had the image in the main index, meaning everyone who visited would activate the link, and a different web site had several members who each had the image in their profile pages, as if one had used it and the others picked it up from them. The image was getting hotlinked more than 100 times a day because of this; at 20K a pop, that’s 60 MB every month, just for that one photo. No thanks.