During the past seven months, while I've been not posting (ouch!), I've occasionally checked my website stats, and I've found that my little site continues to get an amazing amount of traffic.  There are some old posts which are heavily linked, like Tyranny of Email and Unnatural Selection.  (And Religion vs. IQ continues to be debated!)  This is great, thanks for reading.

[ Update: on 6/14/08 I retroactively added a post in September 2006: a perfectly incredible day ]

But also there are more and more images being hotlinked, mostly from myspace sites but also from various message boards and random blogs.  (A hotlink is where there is a page on one site which loads images from another site.)  I don't mind sharing any of the images I've accumulated.  But please copy them to your own site, so I don't have to serve them!

Anyway tonight, in a fit of procastination regarding other things I should be doing instead, I decided to implement a few rewrite rules to discourage hotlinking:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} /images
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !w-uh\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bloglines\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !newsgator\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yahoo\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) /hotlink.jpg [NC,L]

The net effect of this is that sites which hotlink images are now served this image instead:

If you are the owner of such a site, feel free to copy any images you like, but please host them yourself.  And if you have questions about this, please contact me.  Thanks...

[ Update: the image above was changed to include the URL; that way people might be able to fix the link! ]