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.