One problem every webmaster should be aware of is bandwidth theft. Sometimes, malignant webmasters who like your images may decide to hotlink them, effectively serving your images (using up your bandwidth) on their site. While it may not be a problem ordinarily, all it takes is one time: if a blog with a large readership hotlinks your image, you may use up your monthly bandwidth allowance in the space of a day.

As with most problems, the best way to solve this issue is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

There are a few of ways you can stop hotlinkers from showing your images:

• Denial of Access
• Alternate Image Served
• HTML Document Served

Each of these methods requires modifying the .htaccess file associated with your site. Your .htaccess file protects all files in the same directory as the .htaccess file as well as all files in subdirectories of that folder. When modifying the .htaccess file, remember that it must remain in ASCII format, so use Notepad or any other plain text editor.

The denial of access route is the most common method used. It basically consists of refusing any domain other than the ones you specify to show the image. The modification to your .htaccess file should include the following lines of code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|swf|png)$ - [NC,F]

Make sure that each line is unbroken, and remember to replace yoursite.com with your actual domain name. Notice that this code refuses hotlinking of gifs, jpgs, pngs, and flash files.

Alternately, you may wish to try and gain hits from unwanted bandwidth theft. By serving an alternate image, you will still be serving up images, which causes you to lose bandwidth, but instead of the image the hotlinker requested, you may show an image that states: "To see this image, please visit YourSite.com" or something similar. To do this, simply replace that last line of code (the Rewrite Rule line) with the following:
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg)$ http://yoursite.com/hotlinked.gif [R,NC]
Please notice that in this case, the image replaces only gifs and jpgs with your custom image.

The last method is rarely used, because it takes much more effort to implement, and requires php. But the last method has the added benefit of allowing people to link to your image, which the aforementioned methods do not allow. For example, if someone likes your image and decides to link to it, when the page loads, it will show the referrer as the page that linked to it–which means the RewriteRule from above takes effect, and the above code will deny or replace it. Yet you may not want to deny viewers from seeing your image in such a situation, since the person linking your image is not stealing it for their own use, but is actively referring their visitors to your content.

The idea is to change all requests for a picture file to instead serve an html file that shows the image requested. If someone hotlinks this image, the request will fail, because what your site will serve them is an html file, and browsers will be unable to render the file, and instead will show the generic image placeholder. But if someone links to the image, they will silently be redirected to an html page which will not only show them the image they wanted, but also provide links back to the rest of your content! So with this method, you disallow hotlinkers, and yet provide image linkers with the image they wanted, plus additional content that you specify.

There are two drawbacks to this final method: first, you must be using php; second, you will not be able to serve up an alternate image to hotlinkers. For an in-depth description of how to implement html document serving on image requests, see Thomas Scott’s excellent article on AListApart.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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Many businesses are looking at starting blogging, but they do not know where to start.  Starting a blog is quite simple, and can take as short as 5 minutes depending on the software you use.  The most popular installed platform is Wordpress, which is the software this very blog runs on.  Wordpress is available at http://www.wordpress.org, and they have simple installation instructions on the site.  But installing the software is only the first step, you must then begin the process of integrating the blog into your site. 

If you have a web developer on staff, it is extremely easy to customize Wordpress’ look, simply have them create a theme that matches your site and upload it to the themes folder.  If you do not have a developer you have regular access to, you may have to settle on a premade theme, so look for one that has everything you need.  Choose the number of columns carefully and also make sure the theme supports widgets, more on that later.  It is important to make sure the page is attractive and not overly crowded, as users want a pleasant experience reading your blog.

Once you have your blog’s look setup, you should set up a permalink structure in the .htaccess file that is easier to use than the default setup.  In order to do this, simply go to the options menu and select permalinks.  If your .htaccess file is writeable, Wordpress will take care of this for you, if not you will need to edit the file yourself.  With this taken care of you can move on to setting up some of the more useful plugins available for Wordpress.

Plugins provide your blog with advanced functionality.  By downloading a search engine optimization plugin, you will give yourself the ability to customize specific tags on the site, giving you significantly more control over your blog’s search engine performance.  Social bookmarking plugins provide links to social bookmarking sites like Digg at the bottom of each post, allowing you to easily get your blog more traffic through these sites.  Widgets, little applications that run on your blog, can be added to your sites sidebar, and often provide extra features to your blog.  These include such simple tasks as adding a picture slide show or a random youtube video from an rss feed.  Widgets are easy to use and with the drag and drop interface provided within wordpress, you can easily position them in such a way that your readers are more likely to use them.

By doing more than just adding content, and instead making your blog a page users want to visit, you can draw in further traffic to your site.  Add in the potential for advertising provided by Google for blogs, and you will find maintaining a blog on your site to be an easy way to draw traffic and provide more to your customers.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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With the internet increasingly accessible everywhere and anywhere, it is important to keep in mind that users of your site might be accessing it through a mobile platform rather than through a traditional browser.  This means your site should be accessible to these users, something that requires a certain amount of retooling.  Preparing your site for mobile users means either designing a mobile specific page or creating a separate style sheet for each page of your site, which will automatically be pulled up by mobile browsers.  The later option is the most practical, as it means simply rewriting one part of the site, as opposed to redoing it from the ground up.  This does not mean, however, that designing solely for mobile users is a bad idea, it is simply more time consuming.

Providing a mobile version is important, especially if your site uses a lot of code that is flash or java based.  Most mobile web browsers provide decent html support, some provide javascript support, and almost none support flash or java active in the browser, not even Apple’s iPhone, despite providing the most authentic mobile browser  yet.  This means avoiding this type of application for your sites mobile version.  You should also test out the fonts and formating you have on your site to make sure they render properly in a mobile window.  You should be very careful with tables and lists, as they often break when used in a small mobile window.  By limiting their usage and size in your CSS table you can quickly and effectively make your site easier to use.  Images are alright, but you should use as few as possible and ensure they resize correctly.

Now, with your site redesigned it will likely be less functional and less attractive than the original.  This is a necessary evil in order to provide mobile offerings for your customers.  But this does not mean your site has to be less useful, indeed by marketing pages that are more geared toward mobile users, you can go after the niche early.  Providing applications that can benefit mobile users makes your site an even better resource than it was before.  Google is already targeting this market, providing mobile applications to various smartphones, but anyone can get involved, all it takes is the knowledge to work on the software.

Working toward providing your site to as many users as possible is a good goal that can also help increase profits in the long run.  All it takes is a commitment to developing for multiple platforms, similar to those made in the nineties toward multiple browsers.  In time, more and more users will have access to mobile browsers, it is content that will determine whether or not they are users.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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Developing a successful website is hard work, and nothing is more frustrating than having all that work go out the window as a popular site begins to lose traffic.  These issues could be related to a number of problems, but with the growing number of useful web based software solutions, it is often due to someone else doing your job better.  The internet is constantly changing, software advances are made not just by large companies like Google, but by small teams of programmers, often working on no or low budgets.  Because the web is changing, it is necessary to keep your site up to current standards.  Installing web based software to expand your offerings is such a way.

Software could be something as simple as Wordpress, or it could be as complicated as hiring programmers to develop a new and innovative idea, what is important is that your site grows with the market.  There are numerous options for software, providing different benefits.  Web 2.0 has popularized software that provides networking, Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Youtube, all offer individuals the ability to interact with each other on different levels.  There are also numerous software offerings for providing users organizers or other practical software, Google being a leader in this  But you don’t have to be a giant like Google to offer applications for personal productivity.  Startups everywhere are targeting the different software needs of individuals, moving toward a more web based computing environment.  Getting back to the issue of sites with falling traffic, the reason is that users are flocking to sites that offer them more.

Introducing such software to your site is actually quite simple.  Most developers design their software to be easily integrated into different site designs, so it is simple to incorporate.  The choice between free software and commercially licensed software is a difficult one, as each option comes with different benefits.  Free software is easy to find, and once you set it up it will work for you without any overhead.  But commercial software comes with customer support, which is a benefit as your site will need to be able to handle a lot of traffic, which often means bugs.  Either way, it is best to make your software offerings a logical extension of your site’s functions.  Allow your site to evolve, don’t tack on extra features just to make your page more flashy.

It is essential to pay attention to changing trends on the web.  By doing so you can be prepared for demographic shifts and involved in cutting edge offerings.  Your customers will be better served and have access to new technologies and options sooner, making them more likely to stay a user of your site rather than moving to another.  On top of this, adding new technology allows your site to do its job better in the long run.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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