I would like to take the opportunity today to wish my nemesis, Darrell Ridley a very Happy Birthday.  Why, you may wonder would I ever wish the snake that steals $40000 from me, cancels a hosting account that I had purchased in response to an offer made on the Semiologic forum and then refused to pay affiliate earnings on business that I sent his way during the time when I thought he was a decent guy.

Darrell now takes every opportunity to degrade me both professionally and personally and calls me a liar for making statements that he says that I can't prove regarding his involvement with Cleverbridge Proprietary Limited and the websites it controls.  These websites include semiologicreloadedskins.com,  semiologictutorials.tv, cleverbridge.biz,  hostingprimetime.inc, and of course maxxkremer.com.

But wait, Maxx Kremer claims that Cleverbridge Proprietary is his company and even states the following on their tutorials website:

We were stunned at how Vanosdol could even tie us with the likes of Darrell Ridley.

Wow, imagine, Maxx Kremer basically distancing himself from Darrell Ridley.   Well,  if I owned a company that Darrell Ridley was thought to be a participant, I would take the same stance.  Who to believe?

Anyway, the purpose of this post was to wish Darrell a Happy Birthday.   Tomorrow is another day. 

You may have spent hours tweaking your Semiologic skin, or perhaps paid someone to modify a skin or create a custom.css file to get your site just the way you want it.  But that day will come when you discover that someone else has a website that except for the content, looks exactly like yours. How did they do that.

Your skin file and custom.css file can be downloaded easily by anyone who can copy the URL form your source code.  They can then put it in their skin folder and along with using your graphics can make their site look exactly like yours.

The practice of using someone else's graphics while hosted on their website is called hotlinking.  You insert the URL of their image and when your page loads it gets the image from their site, thereby stealing their bandwidth.  Simply downloading a file, rather than hotlinking requires exactly the same setup.  It requires accessibility.  Take away the accessability and you diminish the incidence of hotlinking and copying of your valuable code and graphics.

The solution is to insert a rewrite rule into your .htaccess file which .prevents direct download of your files from other websites, instead routing them to a permission denied page.  Just insert the following code into your .htaccess file.  Place it at the end after everything else

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?your website.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|css)$ – [NC,F,L]
 

Substitute your site domain (example graphicalguru.com) for

'your website.com" in the above code  This will prevent both copying and hotlinking of your graphics files and your css files.   Graphics files can still be downloaded by right clicking and copying.

Larry