(Just as a quick note: hotlinking and direct linking are the same thing in what they do, but hotlinking is stealing and direct linking is done by permission of the site owner.)
Rheanna, the site owner of the previously mentioned "Electronic Geisha" has commented on my last entry. She stumbled upon this humble blog by accident, and was probably annoyed when she realized I've been munching on her bandwidth, even if she does have a lot of it. This is understandable, and I would be fair pissed if I found out someone was eating my bandwidth that I paid for.
I felt really bad when she mentioned that TKO Radio.net had to shut down her site because of hotlinking. That place was AWESOME, and because it was so very, very cool, it was linked on this blog as well. Hotlinked? Yes. I now feel responsible for running off one of my favorite artists from the web. I'm wondering how much money it cost to upgrade her plan--I want to send her money. Maybe I don't have that much to send, but I could help. This is my fault, or at least the fault of me and a lot fo people like me. One person hotlinking a single little banner on a tiny little blog doesn't do much, but a lot of people doing the same thing does. And for the creator of TKO Radio.net to be run off...this is a very real problem.
So why do I do it? Why did I ever hotlink, if I knew it hurt the artists I admire?
Because until recently, Blogdrive offer NO image hosting. None, at all. And even though it now does, it's limited with the free account. I have started to make the switch over, but it's time consuming and I don't like updating often, much less having to deal with saving and reloading fifty-plus banners, and then re-linking them all.
Rheanna thought of this and offered a very good solution:
"I understand that maybe you don't have the space to host a bunch of images either, but if you need to hotlink, maybe you could e-mail the owners of the page and ask if it's alright for you to link two or three images, plus provide a link to their site. In exchange for a link, I would be happy to do a trade like that. It's more honest and fair to the artists."
This seems excellent. I wouldn't need to ask for any more than the banner that links to their own site.
However, this does seem a bit of a cop out to me. I do plan on hosting all the banners I take myself.
A small snag in the plan: My computer just ran out of space. It's pretty old for a computer--about five, six years old. It's got barely 8 gigs of memory. I completely ran out of space a week ago, and could not run my Adobe programs, which I live on with all my banner-making and photo-editing. So I ran through all my files and chucked everything I didn't need, and archived things I didn't access very often. I'll be getting a laptop with 60 gigs of memory this summer, and until then, I'm trying to make do with my computer. I save all my homework on the college network and all the images I acccess frequently on photo albums online. I just can't save all these banners to my computer. I can barely run Word.
I felt really bad when she mentioned that TKO Radio.net had to shut down her site because of hotlinking. That place was AWESOME, and because it was so very, very cool, it was linked on this blog as well. Hotlinked? Yes. I now feel responsible for running off one of my favorite artists from the web. I'm wondering how much money it cost to upgrade her plan--I want to send her money. Maybe I don't have that much to send, but I could help. This is my fault, or at least the fault of me and a lot fo people like me. One person hotlinking a single little banner on a tiny little blog doesn't do much, but a lot of people doing the same thing does. And for the creator of TKO Radio.net to be run off...this is a very real problem.
So why do I do it? Why did I ever hotlink, if I knew it hurt the artists I admire?
Because until recently, Blogdrive offer NO image hosting. None, at all. And even though it now does, it's limited with the free account. I have started to make the switch over, but it's time consuming and I don't like updating often, much less having to deal with saving and reloading fifty-plus banners, and then re-linking them all.
Rheanna thought of this and offered a very good solution:
"I understand that maybe you don't have the space to host a bunch of images either, but if you need to hotlink, maybe you could e-mail the owners of the page and ask if it's alright for you to link two or three images, plus provide a link to their site. In exchange for a link, I would be happy to do a trade like that. It's more honest and fair to the artists."
This seems excellent. I wouldn't need to ask for any more than the banner that links to their own site.
However, this does seem a bit of a cop out to me. I do plan on hosting all the banners I take myself.
A small snag in the plan: My computer just ran out of space. It's pretty old for a computer--about five, six years old. It's got barely 8 gigs of memory. I completely ran out of space a week ago, and could not run my Adobe programs, which I live on with all my banner-making and photo-editing. So I ran through all my files and chucked everything I didn't need, and archived things I didn't access very often. I'll be getting a laptop with 60 gigs of memory this summer, and until then, I'm trying to make do with my computer. I save all my homework on the college network and all the images I acccess frequently on photo albums online. I just can't save all these banners to my computer. I can barely run Word.
But then, I can't bear the guilt for another TKO incident. So here's my plan: I recently got a premium accound on Fotki, an online photo album. It cost way too much and I probably won't buy anything (not even a pack of gum--I am dead broke) for the next month, but consider all the image hosting I do within the year and my penchant for digital cameras, it seemed like a good investment. It offers unlimited image hosting and direct-linking. You can guess what I'll be doing.
This is just my fix. If there's anyone else out there who hotlinks, cool it. There are just too many other ways these days to host images. There are plenty of free online photo albums out there--if banners were the only thing I was storing at Fotki, it'd be so little that I wouldn't have to pay. I know they offer 10 MB of free space, and Blogdrive offers about 10 MB as well. (That's an estimate--I don't know how much exactly, because Blogdrive never said. I had do do some math to figure it out, but I suck at math, so...) In total, that's 20 MB of space. A 200 x 400 pixel banner, which is the stand size of all by banners on the left, takes a little more than 15 KB of space. To put it in perspective, that means that it's possible to host around 1,338 of these banners for free.
As I mentioned before, I'm currently hosting only a little more than fifty banners. So 1,338 banners is simply obscene, proving 20 MB is more than enough space for the average blogger. Even then, if you use more than the average blogger, what's to stop you from owning more than one Fotki account? An email address? Puh-lease. Any savvy web-user has *at least* two e-mail addresses. (I have around 15) A second account could get you around 669 more banners.
The only reason I pay is because I'm currently using 77.1 MB of space online (that's 537 photos), and that's going to probably double in the next month. I needed the unlimited space.
I'm just pointing out that hot-linking is quickly becoming a fad of the past. It used to be that you had to pay for even the smallest amount of online image hosting and the only think the fans could was hotlink--remember, a lot of us were kids then, too, and didn't even understand how bad it was for site owners. But as I've shown you, that's not the case anymore. We've gotten educated, we understand the web better than ever, and there's alternatives.
Aside from that, hotlinking is becoming more and more difficult as time goes on. Websites are constantly finding new ways to encrypt files and protect images to deter the average net-surfer from stealing images and bandwidth. They aren't entirely effective, of course, and people like me have found ways around Angelfire, Geocities, and Deviant Art's protections. But how long can we stay ahead of the systems? Personally, fucking over Angelfire, Geocities and Deviant Art is just a matter of pride for me. I like to know it can be done. This does not mean that it should be done.
This is just my fix. If there's anyone else out there who hotlinks, cool it. There are just too many other ways these days to host images. There are plenty of free online photo albums out there--if banners were the only thing I was storing at Fotki, it'd be so little that I wouldn't have to pay. I know they offer 10 MB of free space, and Blogdrive offers about 10 MB as well. (That's an estimate--I don't know how much exactly, because Blogdrive never said. I had do do some math to figure it out, but I suck at math, so...) In total, that's 20 MB of space. A 200 x 400 pixel banner, which is the stand size of all by banners on the left, takes a little more than 15 KB of space. To put it in perspective, that means that it's possible to host around 1,338 of these banners for free.
As I mentioned before, I'm currently hosting only a little more than fifty banners. So 1,338 banners is simply obscene, proving 20 MB is more than enough space for the average blogger. Even then, if you use more than the average blogger, what's to stop you from owning more than one Fotki account? An email address? Puh-lease. Any savvy web-user has *at least* two e-mail addresses. (I have around 15) A second account could get you around 669 more banners.
The only reason I pay is because I'm currently using 77.1 MB of space online (that's 537 photos), and that's going to probably double in the next month. I needed the unlimited space.
I'm just pointing out that hot-linking is quickly becoming a fad of the past. It used to be that you had to pay for even the smallest amount of online image hosting and the only think the fans could was hotlink--remember, a lot of us were kids then, too, and didn't even understand how bad it was for site owners. But as I've shown you, that's not the case anymore. We've gotten educated, we understand the web better than ever, and there's alternatives.
Aside from that, hotlinking is becoming more and more difficult as time goes on. Websites are constantly finding new ways to encrypt files and protect images to deter the average net-surfer from stealing images and bandwidth. They aren't entirely effective, of course, and people like me have found ways around Angelfire, Geocities, and Deviant Art's protections. But how long can we stay ahead of the systems? Personally, fucking over Angelfire, Geocities and Deviant Art is just a matter of pride for me. I like to know it can be done. This does not mean that it should be done.
To sum it all up: Be nice, play fair, don't steal the other kiddies' toys and maybe they'll end up sharing with you.
