John’s Ramblings

To have this blog and website, I have purchased my little corner of the web through a hosting provider. In my case, this is Dreamhost.

Dreamhost (and I presume other hosting providers) have utilities that allow you to report on statistics associated with your site. Some of this is pretty useless to me (such as how many of the people visiting my site use Internet Explorer vs. Firefox, etc.).

Some statistics are quite interesting, however. I like to look at the section which shows what search terms folks typed into their seach engines (such as Google or Yahoo) that landed them on one of my pages. For example, my highest hit rate for a while was coming from “colonoscopy”, because I had recently blogged about having one.

There’s also a section called the “Request Report”, which will list for me where folks are coming from in order to access information on my site(s). I started noticing several entries coming from “My Space”. I followed some of these My Space links, and found that folks were not actually providing links to my pages, but rather “hotlinking” to photos on my website and displaying them on their My Space pages. Therefore I end up providing the bandwidth to host pictures for other people. It’s not stealing the Mona Lisa or anything, but I got just a little peeved. Time for my inner geek to take action…

Step 1 was to flag these directories on my website so that search engines would not catalog their contents. This was how these folks found me in the first place, by doing a Google Image search for, say, a guy on a bike in spin class (that would be me). This flagging is accomplished by editing a small text file located on my website which tells the search engine robots to skip specific directories. This would theoretically help prevent future occurrences.

Step 2 was to move all my existing image directories to new directories, with new names. This was the more tedious step, because it also involved editing many of my existing web pages and blog entries to change the directory name. I have taken to hosting most of my blog pictures on Flickr now, so this was not as huge a chore as it could have been.

Step 3 was to have a little fun with this process. Because some of these folks don’t allow you to see their My Space blogs without permission, I could not see in all cases what pictures they were using. There was one fellow, however, who’s blog I could readily see. There about halfway down the page was my picture in spin class, illustrating an entry about how he was going to attend a spin class himself that night. By adding the picture at right to my old pictures directory, and giving it the filename of the original picture of me in spin class, he and his readers received a special greeting.

Since shutting down external link-access to my pics, I now see what pictures they were actually using in my “Failure Report”. The shot of me in spin class was getting the most hits, followed by pictures of a face on a tree, a Trek Madone bicycle, an old brochure from the 1960′s for Schwinn Varsity bicycles, a shot of the Green River Gorge, and last but certainly not least, a shot of my colon polyp that was removed during my colonoscopy back in November ’05.

I know I could have been “direct” about this and asked the poachers to stop. I also could have stopped with Step 2, and call it a day. Step 3 had a lot of appeal, however.

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