Tonight is the Homecoming dance for my eldest son and his girl friend.

Have fun, kids! 🙂

As anyone who has ever known anything about me will attest… I collect domain names.

I like to buy them, start grand projects of monumentally humorous design… then walk way when something shiny or with breasts presents itself to me.

But this time is different.

I purchased a new domain earlier in the week and set about getting the DNS and MX records done. It’s gone live… and I’m actually using it!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you:

Sure… it’s my forum, but damn… that’s a snappy name! (and perfectly apt for a forum).

Jacob, one of the two people I targeted yesterday for hotlinking my images, posted a message on the blog.

dude, sorry about that, but please! tell me how to take that thing off, im sorry i wont ever do it again, i didn’t know. please e mail me.

I replied to his email and told him how to remove it to the best of my knowledge (it’s livejournal… I’m not exactly sure how you go about adding in a background image to it).

I removed the image he had hotlinked to (well… the one I replaced for the one he hotlinked to ). I’ll be watching my 404 errors to make sure he actually removes it from his site.

Good job Jacob! 🙂

Other news… oh hell… there is no other news. My life is a cold and shallow place.

I’ve been going through my stats looking for other pages where the authors feel justified in hotlinking.

WARNING!! Sharp learning curve ahead!!

Exibit A

Exibit B (page fixed… this is a screenshot)

I could have been far nastier with what I put up there, but I’m feeling all generous and stuff today. Tomorrow might well be a different story.

Seriously kids… choose life.

I’m getting killed by livejournal users lately who insist on hotlinking to images on my server.

Bejesus… stop it!

I don’t know if livejournal allows you to upload your own files or not. If they do, upload your own images to it. If they don’t, for the love of all that’s good and pure, please find someplace else that does, and hotlink to that (making sure, of course, that you don’t steal anything that is copyrighted… and everything on this site is).

Each month, I go through several gig of bandwidth that is nothing but hotlinks… this costs me money, and you don’t even give me credit for my work (and no… I don’t make a dime on this or any of my websites… they’re provided out of my love for you and by the cash in my wallet).

Hold your mouse over Officer Todd to get his opinion.

One last note about hotlinking: it gives the owner of the server complete control of your website. You hotlink to an image on my site… a cute picture of a bunny… I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll replace it on my end with an image that is both disturbing and wrong (which is, of course, immediately on your site… until you find it and remove the hotlink).

It’s the small joys that keep me going.