But it's dead, Jim.

That reminds me of this site, where a woman writes about her motorcycle rides through Chernobyl. It includes lots of pictures.

(There is some controversy over the authenticity of her story.)

Here are a few images from that site:

Images removed. Don't be hotlinking! It broke the Cellar page, there, for a while.

This is what she wrote:

This is what I believe she meant to write:

Seriously, who funds these people? I could be a real maverick go-getter wanderlust cool person too...if I had the support of whoever supports all these maverick cool people. :eyebrow:

Sorry, I didn't know that was a problem. I've done that several times in the past, including this post.

I've always wondered what hotlinking was.

Is that different from linking to pictures on a photo-sharing site?

Me? or HLJ?

HLJ, if you link from picture sharing sites it goes by their terms of service. If you link directly from other sites, that's hotlinking; it's considered poor form, or in worse cases stealing, because you wind up using their bandwidth to display the images.

What about post #14, above? Is that done in a different manner?

if hotlinking is a problem, why do we have the capability?

is it hotlinking to:

• right click a picture,
• click 'copy image location' and
• then hit the little yellow square insert picture icon^up there on the border of this text box,
• and paste the picture url in there?

Thanks for asking that question LJ. I've never know what hotlinking is but didn't like to ask for fear of appearing a mook!

Yes that would in fact be hotlinking.

Why *can* you do it? Because it's hard for CNN, for example, to determine whether you fetched that image because you were looking at a page on CNN, or because you were looking at a page on the Cellar. Your browser requests the image in nearly the same way.

There are techniques for limiting access, but they are tricky, and depend on the participation of the browser.

Hotlinking of Cellar images has been a big headache for me. Often I see traffic jump, only to find some remote blog in Russian has hotlinked the iotd.

Now I feel stupid. I probably hotlink a thousand times a day.

so what is your official stance on this, Ute?

the saving/resizing/uploading process is more time consuming, and you lose all control over where the image will wind up in your post.

but if you'd prefer we didn't do it......

I'm against it;

But with a few lines of code I might be able to put together something to replace it. xoB and Clod know... I gave them access to my quickie image uploader, so they could do IotDs without attachments. The Cellar can be its own image host. The only problem is, it's a fairly large security risk. But it's long time that it should be done.

Linked images have a habit of going away, sometimes quickly.