graphic design, freelancing, illustration, advertising, web design

Apologies for Missing Images in RSS Posts from Graphic Design Blog

Written by Tara: Freelance Designer on Monday, 28 of April , 2008 at 7:40 pm

I have been having a few problems with one particular website (no way am I linking to them :) ) copying my posts and images and wondered if I could do something about it.

They ignored me when I tried to contact them so I tried out something David Airey had suggested to stop people hotlinking images by providing the hotlinker with a replacement image (with my web address on it). Unfortunately I didn’t realise that this would cause images not to appear in my RSS feed and then the replacement image would also be stored in a users cache when they clicked through to my site. Teddi Deppner from Creative Web Guru kindly alerted me to this, so thank you Teddi. I apologise for this and have now removed the hotlinking code so hopefully everyone using an RSS reader will be able to view images ok again (if not please empty cache). There are ways to adapt the code of the .htaccess file to allow RSS readers but it was all getting too complicated for me.

Category: General Graphic Design

5 Comments
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Comment by LaurenMarie - Creative Curio

Made Tuesday, 29 of April , 2008 at 12:08 am

Ah, I was wondering if that was supposed to be a joke… Glad someone helped you clear it up!

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Comment by Tara: Freelance Designer

Made Tuesday, 29 of April , 2008 at 8:59 am

Yes, I didn’t realise, hopefully you can see the images oK now. Looks like I lost some readers because of it, I wondered why the RSS numbers were going down so rapidly.

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Comment by Christian

Made Tuesday, 29 of April , 2008 at 10:55 am

If it’s one particular website you could just block that domain. I’m sure that’s possible via .htaccess, another way would be to wrap images via a php-script (src=”image.jpg” becomes src=”x.php?f=image.jpg”) and within that script do nothing but checking if the one bad domain is accessing it, thus blocking the image, and oterwise returning the image file as intended for everyone else.

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Comment by Tara: Freelance Designer

Made Tuesday, 29 of April , 2008 at 6:26 pm

Thanks for he suggestion Christian

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Comment by Jennifer

Made Wednesday, 30 of April , 2008 at 5:21 am

Hi Tara
I can’t believe people have the neck to completely rip you off like that. Glad you got it sorted.

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