OMG, I luv ur background, g1mm3 t3h cod3z!!!111

To the non-geeks out there, one thing that web hosting providers charge for is bandwidth. If you have a 1 megabyte file that gets viewed 1,000 times, that is 1 gigabyte of bandwidth usage. There's an alloted amount of bandwidth you get per month, which will vary depending on the web host as well as what type of package you have with them. The point is there is a limit. When you go over that limit, you usually get charged.

So I was strolling through my site referer logs - something which I should do more often, because I noticed several references to the Blindside desktop images I created a while ago. They haven't been linked from the main site in months, and even so, there's no reason for someone to be using it on their web site (and using my bandwidth in the process, which costs money).

But alas, all is not lost. Part of being a geek means you can use things such as .htaccess and mod_rewrite to make sure people don't steal your bandwidth, and serve up different content instead. Like a different image than they were expecting to show up. *Mwahahaha*

I present the court with Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C, Exhibit D, Exhibit E, and Exhibit F. These I pulled just from the first 100 lines of the log file. I'm sure there are many more as this stuff is viral, “OMG, I luv ur background, g1mm3 t3h cod3z!!!111”

[ I was going to call this post “Bandwidth Stealing” until just now. ]

Depending how long it takes people to notice / remove the image reference, the exhibits may or may not still reflect my humorous change.