I caught my first bandwidth thief today. A nice-looking girl was linking directly to one of my photos in her Xanga blog. (No, it wasn’t anyone I know.) Now, honestly, I don’t mind folks enjoying my stuff, but hotlinking is wrong. My bandwidth bills are for my readers, not hers.

Anyway, I found a great way to protect my images on Preventing Image Bandwidth Theft With .htaccess. So everyone should be able to view my images on my site (or even if you type in the URL directly, I believe) but not by using an <img src=”whatever”> tag.

If you run into any problems, as usual, let me know.