Gordaen’s Blog

Now that my redesign has been live for a few days, I decided to spend a fair chunk of time looking through my logs, focusing on the errors and analyzing for patterns. The majority of the broken link triggers were either to a Google Gadget that I made over a year ago (and have since removed) or to an image. I found the broken images a bit strange, because they were clearly referencing the image locations from before the redesign and I have updated all image tags to use the new locations.

One source was Google Images. For example, doing a search for “Four Presidents” and selecting “Large image size” shows an image that I took of Mt. Rushmore as the first thumbnail (Google modifies your results based on history, so your results may vary). Trying to go directly to that image does not work, but the “Below is the image in its original context on the page” portion works correctly, because the page forwards to the new location.

The other source accounted for nearly all offsite image use. What was that source? The worst site on the Internet, of course. MySpace! This situation is something I hadn’t previously considered in my hatred of MySpace. 1) It’s illegal to use other people’s photos as backgrounds on your site without permission. 2) It’s absurd to steal people’s photos and do it with their bandwidth. I don’t blame MySpace in this situation (it’s more the fault of all those generic MySpace styling sites), but would it be really hard for them to have a section under “edit profile” that is called “styling” where users can paste CSS styling and where MySpace can have a quick reminder that you should not use photos you do not have the rights for? That way they could put the styling in the head of the document where it should go anyway, and they can actually pretend to care about copyright violations.

I looked at the profiles of some of the people who did this and was reminded of why I try to avoid logging into MySpace (but times like this make it useful to have a dusty account). One person was actually from around here but most weren’t. I decided to be nice and not post links to these people’s profiles (though they are easy to find anyway). For now they can instead have blank backgrounds, which are probably easier on the eyes anyway… Some people might play with “.htaccess” to serve up a porn photo for them… I’ll keep that option in reserve.

I did get the chance to see some semi-feedback for one of my images left on the profile/wall of one of the content borrowers:

Dudeeee is your background lake Diablo? cuz it really looks like it…

I can either assume that “Dudeeee” means this person is really excited and the photo is good (yay, me), or I can assume that “Dudeeee” should really pronounced like “doodee.” Since it isn’t preceded by “howdy,” it’s probably a reference to excrement and means that the picture looks terrible. Fortunately, I’m an optimist (though an extremely sarcastic and cynical one), so I’ll just imagine that stealing my photo and bandwidth is a sign of respect.