Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

Live and learn. And I usually learn the hard way, lol. Nothing like experience to aid a little lesson along.

I’ve discovered that toggling on and off the hotlinking features in my cPanel (where I host my blogs) messes with my blogs’ permalinks. This seems to be a common problem. What happens is that the hotlinking changes the coding to the .htaccess file of your blog.

For your information: “hotlinking” is the term we use for the stealing of bandwidth. Let’s say you upload a photo of your weight loss pills to your web host’s server, in your image folder. You then post the photo onto your blog. That photo is being hosted by your web host, at your expense. (Sites like Flickr and Photobucket host your photos for free). Hotlinking is when a person takes the url of your photo from your web host, and puts it on their website. The “energy draw” for the photo at your site and at the thief’s site is coming from your web host and thus using up your bandwidth– a service you are paying for. You are being robbed. You can prevent hotlinking by turning the feature on at your web host’s cPanel, but you risk changing your .htaccesss file, and ruining your permalinks. (Basically what toggling the hotlinking feature does is it deletes the line “RewriteEngine on” line from your .htaccess file. Adding this back in to your .htaccess file will restore your permalinks.

But you DO want to stop the hotlinking of your images. So I found some sites with information about it. Mind you, I am still learning about the process! But so far, preventing hotlinking is working for me for one of my blogs. I just have to get around to adding the code to the rest of my blogs’ .htaccess files.

Using .htaccess to Stop Content Theft
Protect Your Images with .htaccess

Remeber– ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS back up your files before changing them. Your .htaccess file is crucial to the functionality of your blog. Don’t mess with it unless you know what you’re doing and until you’ve backed it up.