Since I first installed the ScratchBack Top Spots widget earlier this month, it has received 20,137 views (according to the statistics in the ScratchBack dashboard). In that time I have received five tips. In other words, five people tipped me, and have had their links displayed on my Top Spot during which time over 20,000 have been exposed to their linky goodness. The widget is set to Auto Bump, which basically means (and I'll cut and paste from the ScratchBack site now):

Auto-bump means that every time somebody new tips you, that person moves to the top of the TopSpot list. Example: If you have 10 TopSpots available, and Reader A is in the #1 spot, and Reader B tips you after Reader A, then Reader B moves into the top spot, pushing Reader A one spot down. This also means that eventually, Reader A will be pushed off the list completely.

In effect that means that whoever buys one of the spots, stays on the list until at least five more people buy a spot after them. So you buy a spot, you could be there for an hour, or, as has happened on my site, you could be on there for weeks at a time. Originally I set a spot on my widget at $1, until I was advised that I was "too cheap". That hurt, so then I decided to set it to $10. Still no further activity. Now I've settled on the princely sum of $3.50. Why $3.50? Well, it seemed like as good a figure as any!

I've also installed it on a couple of other blogs. My little car news outlet, and my music recording labour of love. The prices on those two are a bit lower, but I'd say the music blog is a pretty nice deal right now.

Top Spots uses the "nofollow" attribute so it seems to be all above board in the eyes of the all seeing, all knowing, Google monster. Or in other words, use it for traffic and promotion, not for a page rank boost. In summary, Top Spots, I like it, but I'd like to see more activity on my widget!

What sort of ass master would think that it's a good idea to steal content SwollenPickles.com? Hmmm... apparently the 'BollywoodSpiceGuru' thinks it's a solid idea. To whoever you may be, I don't really care how or why you've done it, but could you please stop doing it? The ass master thing aside, I'm trying to be nice about this.

For everyone else, is it ironic that the post that was pinched is titled 'How to prevent hotlinking and bandwidth theft'? Every since the Alanis Morrisette song, I have to admit, my understanding of the term 'irony' has become a little hazy. But I shouldn't be too hard on Alanis. I mean thanks to music I can now spell 'Bananas' (thank you Gwen Stefani and "Hollaback Girl") as well as 'Glamorous' (thank you Fergie and "Glamorous").

I may have digressed... so, what do you do when you've found someone copying your posts word for word?

I'm thinking of giving my pal Terry Tate a call, see if he has any suggestions.

Go Terry!

Here's a magic eye puzzle type thing I found while checking my Entrecard inbox. Generally eye puzzle and/or 3D stuff drives me flipping crazy. This one is no exception.

Take a look at the image below. It's a checkers (or chess) style board with a large cylinder sitting on it. Take a good look at the image. Pay particular attention to the two sections marked 'A' and 'B'. Now answer this, are blocks 'A' and 'B' the same colour?

Image source: Blogsters Guild.

After staring at this for a while, there was no way that I could say 'A' and 'B' were the same colour, no matter how I approached it. Being the untrusting, sometime skeptic that I am, I opened the image in Photoshop and used the 'eye dropper' tool to find out what colour the two blocks were. Sure enough, they were both exactly the same colour (HEX # 787878). I have to admit, it's quite cool, but at the same time I think it may have fried my brain.

It would seem that TTZ Media is not for me. Having run a few ads on this and another site, the results are anything but encouraging. In around ten days I’ve received a grand total of 1 click, for an estimated payout of $0.15. I just need another $24.85 to reach the payout level. Sadly, at my current rate, I’d say I’d be lucky to see it until well into next year (that’s 2009).

One of the real flaws with the TTZ reporting is that it does not tell you how many impressions you have delivered, and therefore you can’t work out what your click through rate is. Perhaps that’s not such a big deal if you only receive the one click in 10 days? Perhaps TTZ Media ads work better on tech sites? Perhaps not. In any case, I’ll stick with Adsense and WidgetBucks.

Have you tried TTZ Media? Have you had more luck than me? By all means, do share…

Recently I was asked to knock together an article on preventing hotlinking for the Aussie Bloggers Forum that has recently started up. Seeing as though it took me some time to do, and that a lot of people that visit here are non-Aussie bloggers, I thought I may as well post it here for the good of the global community. So what follows is a slightly edited version of that article...

I should mention up front that I'm no expert on any of this. I did a bit of research on the subject when I found out someone had ripped off a nice chunk of my content, words and pictures, and wouldn't remove it after I'd asked them too nicely. Let's get into it.

What is hotlinking?

Hotlinking is when some one links directly to an image or file on your website. For example, if I were to use the following image tag and place in on my site, I'd be hotlinking the image from http://www.aussiebloggers.com.au so in effect, aussiebloggers.com.au would be paying for the data transfer of that image even though it would be being displayed on http://www.swollenpickles.com

This is an example of some hotlinking code...

<img src=http://www.aussiebloggers.com.au/forum/tp-images/Image/absml.jpg />

Hotlinking and bandwidth theft are sometimes used interchangebly, but they are really two different things. Hotlinking is the process, and bandwidth theft is the result. Bandwidth theft is hard to describe.

One of the best ways I've heard it described is, imagine if you have electricity or gas connected to your home. You pay the bill for your usage monthly. Now imagine that your next door neighbour decides to start plugging his/her appliances into your electricity sockets. Now you'll be paying for your own usage plus your neighbours. Now imagine what would happen to your bill if everyone in your state started plugging stuff into your sockets? Get the picture?

To put it another way imagine that you had an image that was 100kb in size. Now imagine what would happen to your bandwidth if a high traffic site used hotlinking to display that image on their homepage. Depending on your hosting plan, it could potentially eat up your bandwidth very quickly.

How did I discover someone was hotlinking my images?

In my case I discovered that someone was hotlinking my images because I received a pingback from the offending blog. When I visited that blog I discovered the owner had been busy doing a lot of cut and pasting. In other cases though, it may be possible for you to detect via reviewing your stats. Google analytics is useful for this. If an image file is receiving a lot of views in comparison to your average pages, take a look to see where that traffic is coming from. Follow it back that way. If you know anything about server logs, that may be worth a look as well, unfortunately I know nothing!

How did I stop it?

In my case the first step was to request that the blog owner remove the image (as well as the rest of the content he/she had pinched). Obviously step one wasn't successful.

Step two. I decided to look at some alternatives, which is how I found it was possible to prevent hotlinking. Hotlinking can be prevented quite easily through modifying your .htaccess file. As with modifying anything, I'd highly recommend that you make a back up copy of your .htaccess file before you touch anything. .htaccess is a crucial file for your site, and amongst other things can be used for redirects, and rewrites, so stuffing it up is bad news.

When it comes to preventing hotlinking, there are a few ways to do it. I'll give examples of my two personal favourites.

The 403 Forbidden Error

Using this method, anyone attempting to hotlink your images will receive a 403 Forbidden Error instead. Here's the code (obviously replace 'yoursite' with your actual domain name.)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yoursite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]

Basically, what that is doing is opening the Rewrite Rule, and then says display the 403 error if the image request comes from any where other than yoursite.com

The Swap Over method

This is my personal favourite, and the method I employed initially to get my message across to the bandwidth thief. This method can also be entertaining. Using this method, anyone attempting to hotlink to your images will be served a different image, of your choice, instead. Obviously what you serve up is only limited by your imagination, and perhaps, your sense of good taste.

Here's the code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yoursite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/copthis.jpe [L]

Basically what this is doing is saying, if a site other than yoursite.com is attempting to access an image, the requested image will be replaced by copthis.jpe. Make sure you use the *.jpe extension and not *.jpeg because otherwise you'll block your replacement image as well. Another thing you need to be careful of is that if there are other sites you want to allow access to your images (eg. you might run three different blogs and want to hotlink between them or you might want the images to turn up in your feed) then you'll need to add these to the exception list. This is a mistake I made first up, before I found out I was serving a number of pictures of bull testicles to all my feed readers (at the time that was probably all 3 of them!).

Here's an example of how you add an additional site to exception list.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yoursite\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yoursecondsite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/copthis.jpe [L]

Basically here, all you do is add ",OR" after the "NC" on each side you want to exclude besides the last site in the list (which you only need to keep the "NC"). So essentially you're saying allow yoursite OR yourseconsite to access the images, but for anyone else, swap their request with copthis.jpe.

Like I said earlier, I had some fun replacing images of Audi's etc with... ahem... other things...

After a week or so, the content came down and I switched from the Swap Over method to the 403. I'd suggest that the Swap Over method is only useful if you want to have some fun with the thief, or make a point, and if you only intend to do it for a short period, as because you are still serving them an image, they are also still taking some bandwidth.

If you want to follow my three post bandwidth battle saga, here they are in chronological order:
Dealing with Bandwidth Theft
Turning up the heat on the bandwidth thief
How I stopped a bandwidth thief

The atlab website was an invaluable resource! I highly recommend checking it out if you want a more intelligent description of hotlinking, they also have a tool you can use to check if people are able to hotlink your images. You can find that here:
http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html#hotlinkcheck

Hope it helps someone.

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I Am Legend. I've read the book, so it was time to see the movie. I have to say, it was the films preview that got me interested in the novel initially, and after reading the book, my expectations were high.

In the film, Will Smith plays a virologist, Robert Neville, who believes that he is the only human alive on earth not infected by a man made plague. Throughout his solitude he is kept company by his dog, and is driven by a promise to his daughter to find a cure to the plague, and "make the monsters go away".

Whilst Neville may, or may not, be the last man on earth, it is not to say he's all alone. Those people infected by the virus, have taken on the characteristics of a rabid dog. They are driven by a thirst for blood and have a violent aversion to sun light, but are not referred to as vampires.

Interspersed throughout the film are flash backs to Nevilles life just prior to the mass spread of the virus. We meet his wife and daughter, and learn the dog that is his companion was left behind by his daughter to keep him safe. Very early on we also learn the virus was a mutation. In 2009 scientists believed they had found the cure for cancer. It was this cure that mutated and evolved into the plague, and it was Neville who worked for the army trying to stop the plague from spreading in the early days.

So Neville's days are spent alone, attempting to find a way to reverse the effects of the plague, search for other survivors, as well as to survive himself. To say much more would spoil the last half of the movie, so I'll stop there!

Obviously this movie was going to sink or swim based on the performance of Will Smith. For a majority of the film he is the only human in shot. Fortunately he does a bang up job or else I Am Legend could have been a stinker! This is a serious Will Smith, there is no Fresh Prince of Bel Air in sight!

Effects wise the film is solid. Seeing New York uninhabited and overgrown is an awe inspiring sight, however this is let down somewhat by the look of the infected. They are convincing enough, but given the standard of a lot of the CGI stuff going around lately, I was a little let down.

So, how does the film compare to the book? Interestingly, the film version, I Am Legend is the first of the three "adaptations" to adopt the novels title. With that aside though, there are a lot of differences between book and film, to such an extent that I'd suggest that it is a little unfair to call the film an adaptation of the novel.

Key Differences:

• The novel is set over a three year period in the late 1970's. Flashbacks aside, the film takes place in 2012.
• In the novel, Robert Neville is an average guy. In the film he's an army trained virologist. Much of the novel is dedicated to Neville studying virology, and attempting to find the source of the virus, and his lack of formal training is a barrier he has to overcome. His study is dedicated to efficient ways of killing the infected as much as anything else. This then leads to questions of his own humanity, and in some ways he becomes a moral "grey area". Obviously, the film does away with all of that, we are told the source of the virus 2 minutes into the film, and Neville's focus is on a cure and saving the infected, he's the 'good guy'.
• The novel draws comparisons to vampires very quickly, the infected can only be killed by sunlight or a stake through the heart. They have an aversion to garlic. The infected also retain some memories of their former life. They gather out the front of Nevilles house and his old neighbour chants his name. Neville spends his days hunting and killing infected while they sleep. In the film, the infected can be shot, and don't appear to speak. With the exception of the odd test subject, Neville doesn't actively hunt, largely because he wants to save them. This makes a big difference in terms of the survival element.
• In the novel, Neville doesn't have a dog, he finds and befriends a stray toward the end of the story, but it dies after 2 weeks.
• In the novel, there are the rabid infected, as well as the "still living". The "still living" are infected people who have developed a way of keeping the virus at bay. They still sleep during the day, but have retained some humanity. During the day Neville can't distinguish between the infected and the "still living" so he kills indiscriminately. This impacts heavily upon the ending of the novel. In the film, there are only infected, there are no "still living". Obviously this means that the last half of the film and novel have very little in common.

In summary, whilst the initial set-up is the same, it does not take long for the novel and film to split off and head down different paths. The one other thing the book and film have in common is the basic premise of survival whilst posing a similar question, when a man loses everything, can he find a reason to go on living?

Overall, the film was a good one. Will Smith puts in an excellent performance throughout. Yes, there are times when it gets a little bogged down, and the ending comes abruptly, but is still a cool film to watch. Check it out if you get the chance. I'm giving it 4 out of 5 pickles.

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Here's a handy little offer for the music lovers of the world, well mostly for the US based readers, unless someone knows something I don't and are willing to share

Napster are offering a 7 day unlimited use trial of there service. All you need to do is check out the following link:

Get 7 days of Napster for FREE

Napster seem to have an interesting setup going. This is from the site:

"You may play any particular song up to three (3) times, after which you will need to subscribe to Napster or purchase the song to play it in full again."

Sounds good to me. Unfortunately at the moment, that service doesn't extend world wide, and plebs like me have to settle for the first 30 seconds, iTunes style. All that being said, where ever you're from, Napster would be worth a look if you're after an iTunes alternative.