I'm talking to you, punk.

A few weeks ago I noticed that someone was hotlinking to some of my pictures from the blog. Not sure what Hotlinking is?  Let’s turn to Wikipedia for help!

Hot-linking is a term used on the Internet. Hot-linking is when someone uses a link to an image that is saved on another website instead of saving a copy of the image on the website that the picture will be shown on. For example, instead of saving picture.gif and loading it on to their own website, the person uses a link to the picture as http://website.com/picture.gif. Hot-linking uses the bandwidth of the person who owns the website where the picture is stored. This costs that person money. This is why many website owners are using .htaccess files and uploading it to their websites.

In some cases website owners use the .htaccess file to replace any hot-linked images with an offensive image to deter any other website owners from hot-linking.

Want more info?  Check out this other Wikipedia article, or this little article over here.

This is considered stealing.

Not cool kids.

I told Scott about the situation and we came to the conclusion that it needed to be addressed immediately.  I wanted to do a switcheroo and either sub in text calling the person some very creative combo of adjectives or redirect it so that the image pointed to some very hardcore adult funtimes.

Because when you decide to eff with me, that is how I roll. I will take you out.

Scott, however, is much more classy and said that in order to be more professional the image will just cease to exist.

Now people cannot steal and hotlink my photos.

Stealing on the internet sucks but it happens.  We have all either witnessed or been a victim of someone stealing images or recipes and using them as their own.  There’s really not to much that can be done about that.  However I can fully stop some punk from hotlinking my images.

If you subscribe to OHC via a reader and my images are no longer showing up for you, this is probably why.  Since I had to stop outside entities from getting my pictures, Google can’t really scrape and pull my images into reader.  At least this is my impression.

I subscribe to OHC as well and I can see pictures just fine in my reader.  When I update Facebook with my latest post, Facebook cannot get images from my site either.  So if you are a fan and have been wondering why there are no thumbnails associated with my posts, that’s why.

Because someone decided to steal my stuff and I had to take care of business.

I understand if not seeing pictures in your reader is frustrating, but I also hope that you understand the situation I was forced into and had to deal with.

Thanks gang!