Tone Parsons

I noticed something odd as well in my server logs…. I’m getting quite a few hits from the country of Seychelles.

I know what you’re saying right now…. “where the hell is Seychelles!?!”.

That would be a valid question, as I’d never heard of the place (and had to look it up).

Here’s what I found out (according to the CIA’s World Fact Book):

• It’s in the Indian Ocean, northeast of Madagascar
• The island nation is 455 sq km in size
• It has a population of ~81,500 people
• They speak Creole.

Now…. why they’re hitting the site is beyond me… but I guess I already had an international audience, so the more the merrier!

EDIT: A little more research (just clicking the first damn link google gave me) shows that it’s a vacation destination.  Therefore, it’s probobly just some people who normally read this crap, but they’re on vacation.

I did a little searching via google today (I LOVE google!!!!) and found the solution for how to deal with those wacky hotlinking kids who use livejournal, blogspot, and myspace.

Modify your .htaccess file!

I added the following code to the top of my .htaccess:

# Begin hotlink image replacement
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?opendirviewer\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ images/tp_no_hotlink.gif [L]
# End hotlink image replacement

What it does is look at the requesting URL for an image. If the request came from one of the 4 domains listed, it replaces it with the image below.

Sure… showing the image still takes up bandwidth, but it’s only 7.49kb, and it will perhaps educate those little smacktards to stop what they’re doing (and still lets me hotlink to my own images from other locatons).

And before you think to yourself “Hey… I don’t use those 4 services… I can still hotlink to Tone’s crap!!”, think again.

I check my logs every single day (yeah… I’m bored). If I see your domain, it gets added to the idiot bucket too.

Choose life!

There comes a time when you need to change certain parts of your life. I’m at one of these crossroads right now.

Sure… this is just a teaser, because I’m not gonna say what’s up. Give me a few weeks, then I’ll spill it.

Other items of less than interest: my quest to replace my bike have been thwarted. I was looking at the new Yamaha Roadliner Midnight. She’s drop dead sexy, blacker than a very black thing, and with a 113 cubic inch (1,852 cubic centimeter) engine… she’s got more power than God.

My plan was to sell my old bike (2000 Yamaha RoyalStar Boulevard) and take the extra from what I owe to use as a down. Apparently, I owe more than I thought.

I assumed I was down to about $1,000 remaining on my bike. I really owe about $3,000. Sure, the bike is worth $9,000, but that means I’d have to finance over $10,000 for the new one… and I’m not into that.

My bike will be paid off next year… so I’ll revisit the idea again them.

And finally… apparently, I’m a chatty bitch.

I was looking at Eve’s website (she’s my most favoritest intraweb person in the world!) to see what was up. She has a script that displays the most recent comments on the side. Yup… they’re all me.
She’s a bit under the weather today, so drop on by, read her site (it’s damn entertaining!), and leave her a comment or 12.

Really… she’ll like it! 🙂

Oh… and one more thing: The post I did yesterday about how much I hate livejournal and myspace users, I still feel that way (with a few exceptions). I had to rename 4 images yesterday (and replace them with highly entertaining yet socially unacceptable ones). All 4 were being hotlinked by different blogs on those services (one of the images was being used by 3 of the little smacktards).

This is why I hate them.

First and foremost, I hate 99.9% of free blogs (and most of their users). They create a massive community of hotlinking little bastards who steal the bandwidth of those of us who actually pay for it.

Now I have even less respect for at least one of the leading blog communities.

Livejournal has added in a new blurb to their TOS (specifically, section XVI, subsection 17, part A and B) that ban the use of popup blockers if you use their service.

Now I understand that adds are how they make money… but banning the use of software that might block those adds is a little heavy handed.

There is one bright side to this…. both Firefox and IE now have built in popup blockers in them. So, using either of the browsers to view a livejournal “blog” is against the rules. Therefore, if you use either of these browsers (and pretty much everyone uses at least one of them), don’t visit any sites on that domain. While your at it, do the same with the myspace community.

Trust me… you won’t be missing much.

If we can reduce the number of visits, we can effectively put them out of business, and therefore cut the amount of bandwidth we have to pay for to keep those hotlinking little smacktards who can’t seem to comprehend the concept of hosting their own content.