Don’t know what bitacle is? If you have a blog you should find out. Check out my first post. I’ll wait…
OK, so the .htaccess stuff that people suggested never worked for me. They still got through, and I had to go to 100 character truncated feeds. That solved the problem of them stealing future posts, but they will always have the posts they stole previously — including hotlinking to my images. And even though they do some fancy dancing to make it look like they’re hosting the images on their site, I can see in my access logs that they are not. And this bandwidth-leeching was pissing me off.
I googled around and found the cool folks at Altlab.com. They have a great anti-hotlinking tutorial. I played around with it and came up with the following.
# hotlinking
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?bitacle\.org/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/suckitbitacle.jpe [L]
This worked great for about a day until bitacle got ‘smart’ and wrote a cute javascript to obscure the referring domain. So I grabbed the IP from my access logs, and changed to this:
# hotlinking
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^213\.201\.119\.162$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^213\.201\.119\.163$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^212\.22\.59\.251$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?bitacle\.org/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/suckitbitacle.jpe [L]
As of today, this works and has the added benefit of displaying the below image on my bitacle entries that have images in them:
Like I said, works fine now, but we’ll see what the cockroaches come up with next. I see some people saying that they think bitacle is ‘responding’ to people’s concerns, but in fact all they’re really doing is reacting to the ways they’re being blocked. I’m unhappy that I’ve had to go to short feeds, but the truth is that I’ll likely leave them that way even after bitacle is long-gone. I don’t want to be wasting my time like this again in a few months when some other splog decides to do the same thing.
Any other mom bloggers out there have questions about how to protect your content? Or help understanding the controversy? I’d be happy to try to help. Stick your question in the comments and we can share techniques with the rest of the class. (And I promise to get back to blogging about poop, cute things my kids say, and whatever else moms are supposed to blog about real soon now.) Later!
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