Attention RSS Readers...
My remote linking rules effectively break RSS readers. To be specific: online RSS readers. For example, Google Reader? Since it's a website that sends a referrer line, it trips the rewrite rule and blocks images and links to music that I've posted. FeedBurner SAYS there are 15 subscribers to my feed, but... I don't get comments on my blog from 15 different people, so I'm inclined to take that number with a grain of salt.
However, for all you out there who are reading with RSS, I need you to verify if you can see images or use links to music. I will provide an example at the end of this post. My theory is that only online readers akin to Google Reader are affected. Offline readers, when you click a link, are going to open a browser and (hopefully) navigate straight to the link and be able to bypass my filter... If it doesn't, tell me the name of the reader you're using and I will attempt to manually allow you access.
Of course, I expect nobody to leave comments, because I've just invoked that age-old rule that when I specifically ask for input, nobody responds... If that's the case, I will assume that nobody cares and I'll leave things the way they are! Thank you for your attention! And now? The links!
Everyone enjoyed that Big Brain Academy music (haha, not)! Let's link that: Title (Big Brain Academy)
And here's an image of... Gilligan's Island?
If the music link doesn't scream Forbidden, and you see the DVDs of Gilligan's Island, then your reader works.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Curiously, images still don't show up in Vienna. I don't know if you should worry about it; it's a mac app, and most mac people probably don't even use it. It is a bit odd though - I get the "no linky lol" image in both the RSS feed view and when opening the website in a tab (which makes use of an internal browser, WebKIT I assume, and I really have no idea why it's not working).
April 24th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Woah, once I posted the link, the RSS viewer started working. Still no image in the feed view, but opening the article in a new tab seems to be ok now. Weird.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
I know there's some funky cache thing going on at times... If you see a "no linky" image, and then you go to the real image, it'll still say "no linky" until you refresh (or do a hard-refresh which, of course, is different on every browser, but it usually shift-refresh or ctrl-refresh). It has to do with Apache literally sending the "no linky" image in place of a stolen image, but it keeps the same file name... It doesn't tell the browser "you're not allowed to have this image, so here's one you can use instead", it merely tells itself "okay, this browser can't have this image, so we'll sneak this one to them instead."
Long story short: If in doubt? Refresh!
April 25th, 2008 at 8:48 am
I use Google Reader. I clicked the music link:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /weblog/media/Title (Big Brain Academy) 128.mp3 on this server.
Also, the picture showed up as nolinky until I came here directly and did a hard refresh.
April 26th, 2008 at 4:10 am
Okay... I thought that might happen...
I allowed google.com/reader, so that should let that stuff through.
Makes me wonder how GoogleBot works, and if I should be allowing that, too...
If it even has a referral... Or if I even want this stuff cached on Google Images.