do not hotlink! [update]

i’ve had a quick look at my referers today.

they are mostly chock-full of referer-spam, so i don’t really look at them too often.

but today, i noticed quite a bit of hits from a page on hattrik.org. because some of my friends are quite fanactic hattrickers i thought someone linked to me and wanted to check back.

so i ended up on the site of the sc hooligen. at first i couldn’t see a link to me, but a quick glance at the sourcecode revealed that the manager of said team hotlinked to an image i shot at the gurtenfestival 2004. i know that as soon as you release your images on the web it’s extremely hard to track abuse of them [1], but hotlinking to a file is definitely a no-go!

so i thought, i’d do a little prank with the site, and replaced the image to something else.

i wonder how long it stays like that.

before on the left and after on the right.

Hotlink1 Hotlink2it says in german: the manager of this team is a jerk, ’cause he steals pictures from other servers to pimp his profile.
[1] that’s why pretty much everything i release is under an attribution license (see also here :-) )

update: everything is fine now, keep walking on, no need to stare.

but i hoped that he’d at least write me an email :-) and because i couldn’t find one on the page that hosts the image now i’ll just leave it here…

Hattrick Update

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blocking spam

i just cannot seem to stop it!

my blog is sometimes so majorly hit by spam comments, that chris sent me an email saying that i strain the server too much (technospeak: “ca. load 20”).

even renaming the relevant files did not help, so it had to take more drastic measures. [1]

i’ve installed a plugin for MT3.2 which tries adds a hidden input field and then obfuscates the code through some javascript trickery.

because that works before the spam comments get submitted to the system this should lessen the strain on the server a bit (i hope!).

and since i can leave comments, everything seems to work fine, so i’ll just have to wait if it really works with the server load…

[1] if that’s not gonna help now i need to start doing something with captchas, but i really detest them!

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picture of the week 26

yesterday i went down the aare from uttigen to bern. but not like everyone else, equipped with a rubber boat, but with a rubber skin :-)

urs and me snorkeled down the river in about 3 hours.

it was really fun, mostly because everybody else couldn’t believe what we did.

the water was rather cloudy and not very warm (although it was bearable with my 7mm rubber skin). in the image below you can see urs relaxing and almost falling asleep. if you want to see the other pictures of the series, then you can see them in this set on flickr.

Urs

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