Recently I had noticed that my DSL line was slow. At first I didn’t think much of it because in the past I’ve had this problem often. There have been many things in the past that have made my site slow: line noise, people downloading files, me downloading files and other stuff I don’t know about.

I was checking web usage graphs and it dawned on me that I never set up logging for my old pictures site (now gone). First off, I wanted to change the name because squarism is kind of my professional blog (suitable for family and peers) and hexameter is my “screw around” site (not suitable for anyone). I moved the domains around making squarism an alias and more imporantly I started logging hits for my photo gallery.

Immediately I noticed people were hotlinking images off my site, meaning they were putting an [img src="my site"] sort of tag right in their page instead of downloading the image and serving a local copy. Many call this bandwidth stealing and other sorts of mean things.

I searched around for quick fixes with my current setup but eventually realized that Gallery 1.x couldn’t really help me. Nor could I do any black magic with mod_rewrite (very hard). So I decided it was an application problem and looked at Gallery 2.0.

Happy day! They had planned and implemented a feature called Block Hotlinking that solved my exact problem. So I followed the upgrade instructions (which weren’t that great at first thought) and the install was really, really easy. Way to go Gallery Project! I soon had my old pictures online.

I had even found a great plugin to WordPress for Gallery 2. But, I hit a major wall with this plugin. Basically, Gallery can’t handle subdomains so I can’t have Gallery on xxx.domain.com and have my blog on blog.domain.com, yyy.domain.com or domain.com. Bah!

So I had to completely re-org, screwing over all the people who had pictures off my gallery as their avatar or stealing my images for use as their background for their webpage. Oh well, they shouldn’t have hot linked.

If you are one of those people, just download the image you miss so much at my shiney new gallery. Or see the images that you liked so much right here:

wallpapers/stinkoman_1.jpg
wallpapers/domokun/domo6.jpg
wallpapers/domokun/domo10.jpg

However, the old picture site won’t be up. The new one is here. The link is also up top — called “pics” as usual.

Also to the right is a little latest photo block, displaying and linking to the latest picture I’ve uploaded to the gallery. It’s a Sproinky Thing.

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