Take That, Rupert

The majority of deadprogrammer.com traffic these days consists of myspace.com users hotlinking images. I really don't mind hotlinking, in fact, I encourage it, but the thing is myspacecadets never ever link back to me. It's common courtesy - if you use somebody's image as well as server resources, provide a link back.

Well, now I use this little snippet of code that in my .htaccess file to replace any hotlinked image from myspace.com with a tasteful ad for deadprogrammer.com:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.*\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ photos/hotlinked.jpg [L]

All of a sudden, hundreds of popular myspacers are promoting me:

Classy. If you have a better idea for a replacement image, let me know.

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Comments

This is just awesome :)

Dope. I just implemented your idea for my own site.

For now, I'm using your image, e.g. here -- http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=7569923 (see 5/28). :)

Awesome. The link does not work though.

Well, there's always goatse..

My approach:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000561.html

I don't think goatse would stand out enough on most myspace pages, and I don't think they would recognise Qbert :)

Hmm ... it does for me. Some kid named "tigertigger". Maybe you have to already be logged in.

Nono, the Q*bert image is what they were stealing! Here's what they get instead, now:

http://www.codinghorror.com/images/block.gif

He heh, it started working - I guess myspace had some sort of a server hickup. Nice :)

Ha! Nicely done!

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