Hotlinking the Vegetable

Prehistory

I started a blog, Middle-Fork about a year ago. I thought I was going to post hiking stories and photos, things with maps and pointers to cool stuff you might miss, and history - you name it. But a blog has a mind of its own, and MF quickly turned into a one-a-day photoblog.

I've been taking pictures for a billion years, but what happens to them? I hold the slides up to a light one time, go "ooooo," and then put them away. Safe, unseen. I take a lot of photos, and when I did manage to show anyone, people like them, mummble about getting prints. But really, they just sat.

No more! I love this medium. Now I've got the entire collection scanned, I'm slowly but surely putting them on display, and, a big bonus! I have a strong new motivation to take more.

And then I finally went digital, and the number of new pictures has multiplied by a order of magnitude or two. And, well, anyway: I have lots of photos I know people will like. Someone, somewhere will like each one, and the web lets me display them in such a way that there is no artist leaning over the shoulder wondering, hoping to see which ones they like. Hoping they are strong enough to look at enough pictures, in case they're that hard to please type.


Well, people do like them, and I'm very happy to share. That's why they're there.

I'm a software engineer, and by now I've spent years watching transaction logs in realtime, analyzing the behavior of system interactions. And now, what joy! I have the access log for Middle-Fork scrolling in a window whenever I'm online. It's great fun! So, many times, I'm still looking over people's shoulders as they leaf through my pictures. This is neat; I love it. It has helped me decide what pictures to post, and even more radical, what pictures to go take.

The Dawning of Civilization

If you know what hotlinking is, you kind of know where this is heading.

I was watching the log scroll by one night, and saw a photo fetched from some odd site. I plugged the referrer url into a browser and went to see what was up. And there was my picture, one entitled Things fall Apart, on this person's homepage. Cool! I thought, then looked around for what I would have placed nearby, an attribution. But... No! No such beast anywhere in site. I was confused and appalled. How could they have forgotten?

I thought about it a few days, and then decided, what the heck, let's show a few more pictures off. So I picked some other picture, and swapped it in with the same file name. I did this for a few days, then got bored, and set it back to the original.

I decided that it was okay. I don't pay for bandwidth by the byte, so this is not an issue for me. People can check the image properties if they're curious, and see where a picture comes from. Maybe I'll get some hits that way. But I doubt that it happens at all, really. Who checks image properties except geeks?

I mentioned this to a friend, who also has a photoblog. He encounters the same thing, and was a bit peeved. He would swap in nasty messages, and he took to slapping his copyright notice on the image. I can see his point, but it's not me. I put the images up expecting people to see them. I naively didn't expect hotlinks, but I really don't mind. And I've never liked putting text, or even my signature, on any artwork, unless it was an integral part of the work. I would jot it on the back, if that.

I don't think it's a good idea to swap the images, what with so many image spiders crawling around: my pictures are indexed all over the place, I want them to make sense to people using the search engines.

So I've was merely noticing the hotlinks, and otherwise doing nothing.

The Dark Ages

One day my hit rate went through the roof (short roof, it's all relative.) I researched a bit, and discovered that a member of a popular band used a picture on their homepage. This was too much, I was jealous of my ability to watch stats and understand my traffic. This messed things up. But I was just annoyed, I didn't do anything, but it got me thinking about it again.

I decided I would track down all the hotlinkers, and publicly thank them for liking my picture enough to hotlink to it. That way, I could be polite, and make others aware that it is my picture. I waded in.

It's almost impossible. Some places work out well, forums and chat boards of various kinds. I would register, and join in the conversation. The reaction was neutral to enthusiatic. That's cool. Other places are ridiculous, such as myspace.com. It's difficult to get through to people, and when I have managed to get a message into a bottle that looks like it's floating in the right direction, I've never heard back.

Oh well. This isn't working. I looked around a bit, googling hotlink, to see what others thought. Most people have a pretty tight grip on some portion of their anatomy. I find this distasteful. The only link I found that presented a civilized approach is A LIST apart. But it's not an approach just anyone can take, you need to futz with your server and source, but it is at least polite. And, really, it's still not me. Things will resolve in ways people don't expect.

Still, I can't be bothered. All these solutions assume that the hotlinkers have a clue; not a good assumption. I want to share my pictures, and I want to know when people look at them. I would much rather have an unattributed hotlink, than for someone to take the file and put it on their own server, even with attribution. I want to know. And really, these are pretty low res images compared to what pops out of the camera. I lose nothing by letting people do this.

I needed a new approach.


The Age of Enlightenment

Inspiration Struck! I decided to start a blog to document the use of my images. Thus Hotlinking the Vegetable was born. As I discover people using my images, I intend to create a post documenting the use, link to the site, say who it is and what they're up to, maybe add some scripting to keep count of hits, maybe create a side file with the IP addresses listed. Stuff like that.


I want to be positive about it, which led me directly to realising I need to post pointers to people who do the right thing, and give an attribution for the images they use. And people who link to MF, either in a post or blogroll. They're being gracious, I should be the same.

MF is mute, and I've tried to link from Far Cartouche, my nonphoto art and babbling blog, but like MF, FC is an ongoing work of art - actually talking about things in a directed comprehensive way is impossible. I manage to squirt a few data points out, but it's always a little weird.

Hotlinking the Vegetable is my solution. I'll (slowly) catch up on what's come before, and then post anew as events warrant. It's an experiment, I don't really know what will become of it, but I'm having fun already! Perhaps someone out there will enjoy it, too.