And lo, -hh emerged from the ether
and spake thus:
"Frank ess" wrote:
I think Mr DOCJohnson is hypercritical.

YMMV.


I looked at the blog-like page and found it included some good
information. It seemed to me there would be nothing of much use to me
behind the other links, so I didn't follow them.

You got more out of it than I did.


I would recommend to Aaron that he reconsider editing "Entire sites
such as YouTube, digg, del.icio.us, and the brand new
PhotographyVoter.com is based on this principle." "sites ... is" seems
not-too-pretty-good to me.

That's merely grammar. I'm more concerned about the key points that
were missed, namely that while the whole 'sharing is caring' has a
point, and while it can be beneficial, the act of directly revealing
your image's URL just makes it all the easier to be misused, such as
copied (theft) or hotlinked to (appropriation of your bandwidth & your
storage that they're not paying for).

I've been debating on if to switch over to .PDFs as a means to disrupt
the casual 'borrower' of my copyrighted stuff. I have a couple of
trial balloons running now; will see what their hit rate looks like in
the logs in 2-3 months.


-hh


Good catch on the grammar mistake there, I just fixed it.

What I perhaps should have added is something about how your web
server can be configured not to serve your images via direct links
when they are placed on other sites. I had that happen once with an
Apple logo that I had on my site simply as a visual aid for an article
about logos. Some kid placed it in a forum post (ironically flaming
Apple), so I started blocking outside referrers on image file
requests.

I track my site's traffic closely using AWStats (.org) and at the
moment my bandwidth is not being stressed so I am not blocking outside
image referrers; I figure it's "free" publicity, the only price I'm
paying is a bit of bandwidth.

When I started writing this latest article, being a web developer
myself, I found myself slipping deeper and deeper into technical
issues that I'm not sure would be helpful to a casual photographer. I
could outline, in great detail, how Apache's mod_rewrite can be
configured to block outside sites from snagging your images, but I
haven't met many photographers who are also server administrators and
I wonder how helpful that would be. Still, I suppose it bears
mentioning.

I've written a bunch of articles in the past few months and most of
them have been very well received, but I have also found that the more
technical they get (not related to photography, but rather
programming, server configuration, etc.) the less my readers seem to
care, so I tend to shy away from being too nerdy outside of the
photography realm. There is definitely a geek threshold.

--
Aaron
http://www.fisheyegallery.com
http://www.singleservingphoto.com