Occasional Thoughts

KDE 4.4 comes with a great native editor for your blog: Blogilo. Out of the box it supports Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType and Google GData. So Serendipity users may feel left out. However you can use Blogilo with Serendipity anyway since there is the XML-RPC plugin available. You just need to know how to configure it.

As I already wrote I am tired of people that use my images on their sites and consuming my bandwidth. Don't get me wrong. I always appreciate links to my site and I am pleased if you find something useful. What I don't like however is that someone refers to high resolution images as background images for his site that are meant as desktop wallpapers.

A colleague gave me the hint to block this sites by the referer through .htaccess files in the respective directories. And this works great for me:

Each time I look into the statistics for my site, I discover yet another site that is directly referencing pictures from my server. This month it is a posting on a spain site, that embeds a screenshot. What makes it worse is that the poster used a high resolution screenshot with 1920x1200 pixels and the traffic is quite big. Some months I had someone with a MySpace account, who has taken a wallpaper as background for his personal page. And this guy did not took one of the smaller resolutions... no he used the biggest wallpaper I have posted.

So please.... I do not want to prohibit the use of screenshots or wallpapers from my site. You can use them free of charge. But please do not let me pay for the bandwidth you are causing. So feel free to copy the images to your server, but retain from <img> tags that refer pictures from my server. And even then it would be fair and nice to mention on your site, where you have taken them from.

Otherwise I will have to stop publishing high resolution and high quality pictures here.