Remote Linking
So with the release of WordPress 2.5, there is a handy-dandy little plug-in that lets you use the statistics interface used by WordPress.com. I used to have a little behind-the-scenes stat page that let me see neat things like what pages were most popular and top incoming searches and such. I got rid of it because it would quickly fill up your SQL database with junk and the entire system would get slow... This plug-in, though, monitors your blog and stores the information at WordPress.com! Very cool!
So my hourly routine consists of refreshing Google Reader, checking my planets on OGame, checking my nice little nation on NationStates, and taking a glance at my blog's dashboard, which consists of latest comments and statistics... On the statistics page, I noticed an incoming link! Oh goody! Someone has finally decided to link to my blog from one of their own posts! In a rush of excitement, I decide to follow the link given to me: http://somenspegelboll.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-has-sonic-screwdriver.html (The blog, I might add, is by someone living in Sweden, and I don't understand Swedish, so if there are any vulgarities, you have my apologies, but I must remind you that I am not responsible for what you may see on someone else's website!) Obviously someone talking about the Sonic Screwdriver and my respective post on my purchase of the thing. I read the post and... No link? Hmm. I read and re-read and read comments and peruse the navigation bar and... Nothing. Leave it to Incoming Links to screw up again. This wouldn't be the first time... But then I mouse over the image! Aha! They were remote linking this image:
It's just a product shot I saved from Google Images. It's no big deal that they were using it... But they were directly linking to my image, hosted on TW's server. They didn't have the sense to at least copy the image to their own server before posting it? Whenever I host an image, whether it's my own or something I found online, I always copy it to my own site before posting it... Not only for security, so that the image will be there as long as I need it to be, but because... It's just not very polite to feed off someone else's bandwidth for an image that's displayed on your own site.
So! Once I discovered why there was an incoming link, I decided to look into something I had considered before, but never needed because... Well, I didn't think I was popular enough that random people would happen across something I posted and then link directly to it. I looked into remote linking protection! First, I looked up some nice .htaccess code. I found the perfect sample from a place called Altlab. Unfortunately, there was an error in the RewriteRule and I had to change a bit, and then there was an error where it would bring up the protection image on images I posted to my blog, so I had to change the first RewriteCond:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?rivenwolf\.net/* [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ nohotlink.jpg [L]
But that code works like a charm and is currently in place! Then, I spent about 30 minutes whipping up a quick image. It's a bit small, but it only weighs about 10KB, so it does the job! Looks pretty nice, if you ask me... Might stand to be a little larger, but the entire point is to save bandwidth, so it'll stay small for now:
So I saved it, uploaded it... And tested it. Blog works perfectly, and navigating directly to an image works perfectly... And linking to an image anywhere on rivenwolf.net from any other site will pop up that little beauty! Hey, I even had a site to experiment on:
So there you have it, folks!