After 16 days, two hospitals and two surgeries, we brought baby Alice home yesterday. Which inevitably left us with the “WTF DO WE DO NOW?” question that all new parents wind up with (we’re just a little behind because of her extended hospital stay). In any event, last night, as a distraction from the frustration of new parenthood (she won’t eat/sleep/tap dance…what do I do??) I finally plugged a hole in this website.

Ever since my loonygames days, I’ve been a master of search engine p1mping. As a result, I get quite a few referrals from Google. Unfortunately Google Images’ ubiquity, added to the popularity of sites like MySpace, has led to a whole generation of image leachers. I post a lot of images in this blog, and it always irks me when someone direct-links to one of them without credit of any kind. I don’t even mind direct linking…it’s direct-embedding that annoys me. You get an image on your site as if you had posted it yourself, but in fact you’re just draining resources from my site.

Well, that’s not a problem any more.

Last night, in my sleep-deprived state, I threw together some simple .htaccess trickery to keep leachers from manhandling my images. Anyone who attempts to do it will now, instead of the intended image, wind up with the one on the right there*. We’ll see how long it takes people to notice the difference, but here’s an amusing example, of a site that just leached photos of Jessica Biel from around the web and loaded it up with Google ads for clickthroughs. Scroll down a little to see my image nestled in there among the glamourous shots of Ms. Biel.

The funny thing is that I don’t even care about the bandwidth hit. It just annoys me that this is acceptable behavior to some people. It was considered poor taste back in the Geocities days, for god’s sake (then again, a lot of MySpace resembles the worst of Geocities, come to think of it).

So anyway, feel free to steal my images. Nine out of ten times I just repurposed them myself anyway. But don’t direct link. That’s just sleazy.

*Old school readers may recall this image as Mike Sanzone’s cover painting to loonygames issue 1.2. It’s still a gem.