Crazy Uncle George's Blog
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Friday, September 1, 2006
It's Getting Hotlinked Here...
So our girls are taking off all their clothes... But I should explain that I was going to set up some informational pages soon. One of the things was going to be about image use. As you probably have already noticed, this site is very different regarding procedures that the usual celebrity sites follow. For instance, we don't care if you take any of our images, original or not, and for our originals you can crop out the bar marking it as an original as you wish. They're just there to mark the others as not being originals anyway, since the non-originals are usually corrected for bad scans, mailing labels, etc. so they look original. But one of the things that always pisses people off is hotlinking, i.e. using an image directly from the celebrity site's server rather than downloading it and posting it on another server, as if you hotlink it uses up the original site's bandwidth. And of course, the original site pays for that bandwidth but the people visiting the site where something's hotlinked (almost always a forum) trigger ad revenue for another site instead and don't even know that they're visiting an image from the original site.
So most sites make sure images can only be requested by their own pages, but I don't do that as hotlinking doesn't really bother me. We're still well below our bandwidth limit and this site is up to get people better images than the existing sites. There are costs to the web page, but we're making enough to pay it back. And this site is here to get people images, not to make money, so not getting extra isn't a big deal.
But lately there's been one big problem. The people hotlinking in forums haven't been using thumbnails. I don't even understand why you would hotlink a whole image of ours, as they tend to be big. I use the highest quality version of an image I can find, and yes, I'll download the same picture maybe 20 times from different sources just so I can compare them and make sure I've got the best one. The only quality exception is when the higher quality one crops out something that I want in, like a body part. So I'm not sure if you've visited the Rankings page, but it ranks the traffic for each girl by the full-image downloads. Going by the page would be impossible, as the letter pages contain several girls each (except Q and X) and some girls only have those. But hotlinking the full image completely throws off the numbers as the image will get an extra request any time the page someone hotlinked it on is accessed rather than the other images, which have to be clicked for the specific image. Also, the most downloaded images count the most, so hotlinking one image can have a big impact. So I'm not sure if you remember when Lindsay Lohan jumped up from 17th to 1st in the cumulative new domain rankings in a few days, but when I was tracing various things I found the pages where they're hotlinked. That Shannon Elizabeth image you see the thumbnail for is the latest culprit, and she basically overnight jumped from some middling spot to #2 in the new domain rankings. I haven't looked for the page hotlinking it yet, but it's pretty obvious as the one image is way above the others and the downloads jumped up way more quickly than any non-hotlinked one.
Anyway, the damage is done, so it's not like we can just not get any further full-image hotlinking and it's time I just think of another way to more accurately rank the girls' traffic. If you are going to hotlink, though, then from a design standpoint it makes a lot more sense to use thumbnails. You can just use this site's own thumbnails, which are really easy to figure out. Every full image on the site is in a letter folder, and its thumbnail has the same name but is in a folder named thumbnails below the original folder. I should warn you, though, that this site has a big problem for hotlinking, which is that the images don't keep the same names. I rank the images, so if I think I messed up the original ranking I'll renumber them, or if I get new images they'll push the number parts higher on the older images that aren't as good as the new ones.
But enough babbling. Let's talk updates. There are new images for the girls of the American Pie movies, which I actually just had sitting around had forgotten to put up. Well, I also updated Christina Applegate, who now has enough pictures for a full page, but I got new stuff of her afterward so I'll update her again in a few days. And finally (I'm saving the best for last), I've got new shots of my favorite girl, Stefani Morgan. I should add more porn stars, I suppose, as our two get a ton of traffic, but it feels weird adding people whose images are naked the vast majority of the time to a non-nude site because it's like setting up a 3-card monte table outside a casino. Speaking of sure ways to lose money, I have to go cripple the economy more with dumbass policies, so until next time...