There are times when these disabilities of mine must have their way.
And this is one of them.
Back as soon as I’m able. In the meantime I’ve brewed up some coffee and ordered doughnuts for the interim. Feel free to make yourselves at home and if you have to use the bathroom, please leave the traditional quarter in the cup sitting on the tank. It pays for the doughnuts.
“Hot Linking”, “Direct Linking” or “Leeching” is the topic today. What it is and how it applies to common courtesy within the Blogosphere.
First a definition:
“Hotlinking” (also called “hot linking”, “direct linking” “leeching”, and “bandwidth theft”) is a term referring to when a web page of one website owner is direct linking to the images or other multimedia files on the web host of another website owner (usually without permission, thus stealing bandwidth). This not only causes the other person to pay for the bandwidth of the hot linked file, but often is considered as intellectual property theft in the context of original material.
The most basic form of hot linking is using a URL to an image on another site that’s not yours in order to place that same image on your site. This is done using something called “image tags” and can be used in place of storing your images on your own host/server or separate online storage. There’s nothing wrong in using image tags as long as it’s to your own images residing in your own online image storage or from another one of your sites. It’s when you use an image tag to place an image on your site that’s located on someone else’s site is where the line is drawn, especially if you do not ask their permission first and that’s just not cool.
Bottom line…don’t do it! Besides, it’s just bad form. Why? Because even in this day and age where the popular web hosts bandwidth allowances are usually in the low terabytes (frickin’ huge in other words), when you’re hot linking as described above, you’re using up someone else’s bandwidth every time that image is viewed on your site. It’s not your bandwidth and you’re not paying for it so please don’t do it. You also might be taking a chance of hot linking to an original copyrighted work done by the site owner themselves…and that site owner might be a real a**hole when it comes to someone stealing their work. Word to the wise there.
There’s not any solid “do’s and don’ts” type rules when it comes to blogging so we have to police ourselves as it were. There’s no good reason to hot link to images and media that belong on someone else’s site unless they give you their explicit permission to do so. Besides, it’s just good form among blogger’s not to.
Yes folks, Punxsutawney Phil was yanked out of cozy burrow in his tree stump, saw his shadow and jumped back in, slamming the door behind him so it looks like six more weeks of winter are upon us. Up here in the Northeast Kingdom we kind of take that for granted anyway but I’m sure that those folks in the Midwest and around the Great Lakes are more than ready for a break. Sorry for the bad news.
In the meantime I understand that ‘ol Phil is packing to go south for the rest of the cold weather especially after the ice storm that came through yesterday and I can’t say as I blame him being yanked out of a deep sleep like that.
So keep the shovels oiled up (cooking spray works good for this) so the snow doesn’t stick to ‘em, stock up on the ice melt (that environmentally safe stuff) and keep your snow boots handy ’cause here we go again.
Spring is always worth waitin’ for!
I started the day off with a "latest news" type post and in the making of this post (by bantering around the news sites and listing the most interesting stuff I could find for your reading pleasure) a friend of ours stopped by wanting to use me and my Internet connection to book tickets from here to there for yet another trip he insists he can’t afford. Don’t ask…you’d have to meet him for yourself. This little effort took 3 hours with him ending up on my phone talking to Travelocity in person because the flights were being booked faster than we could work Travelocity’s website.
It never fails to amaze me that booking flights 3 and 1/2 weeks ahead of time doesn’t provide enough lead time apparently.
This is how the post started out…
Just a short haul through the news here.
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Now the thing about a blogger writing up a "what’s news" post like the one above is that you need to get it published as soon as possible simply because the life of the stories you are posting about is approximately 3.1417 minutes at the outside, so the above semi-post was well past history by the time 3:00PM rolled around.
Be that as it may and in the light that this post really doesn’t mean anything anymore, I just thought you might want to see that I actually attempted to get something out today. And the next time our friend wants to come over and book tickets for a flight that doesn’t exist, I’ll charge him by the half hour.