There is victory in the Lord

Those who post images on their blogs know that it's only a matter of time before someone comes along and hotlinks to them. I've been kvetching about this forever, and have had negative luck with .htaccess as every time I try to put it in my directory, my blog goes tits up. (This is because I am an idiot, but that is neither here nor there.)

I've discussed the hotlinking issue at length with jpo, who is my go-to guy for all things computery.

"Why do you care about the hotlinking?" he asked. "Doesn't Dreamhost give you like a gajillion gigs of bandwidth? Or is it a moral issue?"

Of course it's a moral issue, I explained. Because it seems as though the three biggest perpetrators of this horrible, horrible crime--a crime that pales only in comparison to baby-raping and the systematic campaign of terror that is Andie McDowell's film career--are Livejournalers, frequenters of racist message boards, and Italian soccer fans. (I don't have too much against that last group, but they need to learn some couth. If they know how to post images, they should know simple intarweb protocol. I don't care how they do it in my home country.)

It's particularly creepy with the racists/Freepers. So anytime I find someone from the 3rd Battalion, 319th Airborne, Armchair Regiment who is linking to, say, a photo of MLK, I post the above photo in its place. This is satisfying, but only to a certain extent.

Then on Thursday afternoon I discovered that I could, in fact, block hotlinking via my Dreamhost Web Admin Panel. (I know, I know: DOYYYY.) So now, when I check my stats page, I see over 100 failed requests in the referrer report, and they all come from, like, MySpace and FreeRepublic and weird Scandinavian music discussion forums. Whoopee! Monumentally satisfying.