According to query statistics from Google, the top search terms bringing people to this page are:
I really hope the people that search for “Cleaveland Steamer” are just trying to find out what it is because they heard it somewhere…
Make sure your Apache installation has mod_rewrite installed and usable, and create this .htaccess file in any directory that you’d like to protect from hotlinking:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://neuro-tech.net/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.neuro-tech.net/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.bloglines.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|bmp|BMP)$ - [F]
It’ll check and verify that the referer is either blank, from my site, or from Bloglines (since I use a lot of inline images on posts). Any other referer gets a 403 Access Denied sent to them. You can also get creative and redirect them to tubgirl or something too.
Before I set this up I was chewing away over a gigabyte a day in from shit like MySpace profiles and Xanga pages. At first I was doing redirects to shock pictures, but it hit me that nobody even knows that when they embed someone else’s image in their page then that someone else has to pay for the bandwidth. No one even cares where the images come from, so realizing that I went the “nice” road and return a broken image instead :-)