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When Half a Billion Isn't Enough

10.01.2003

I've been seeing a lot lately about the latest Forbes 400 list coming out. Seeing as how my interest in wrestling has been wanning of late, I decided to look and see how much Vince (WWE head Vincent K McMahon to those of you that know no better) was doing.

A quick look at 2000 saw #260 with $1.1 billion in net worth. That was followed by the XFL fiasco in 2001 that saw him drop to #364 and $700 million. His net worth continued to drop in 2002 as he fell to #386 and $570 million. This year, Vince doesn't even make the list, although he managed to up his worth to $575 million.

I get mad when I lose a $20 bill. I would hate to find out I was worth $600 million less than I was 3 years ago. Of course, I'm not worth $600 million now, am I? I'm barely worth $600!

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Preventing Hotlinking 101

09.30.2003

I was looking at the weblogs for the weekend and found that a country music messageboard had shot up to become my #2 refferer. Wondering what this was all about I went to see what was going on. It seems I have a pic of Toby Keith wrestling that was being linked to from their message board.

I have no problem with people using images. Heck, this was one of the few pictures that I actually took myself, but it's the bandwidth that goes along with them linking to the picture here that bugs me. If I had unlimited bandwidth, I wouldn't worry about it. And to be honest, it's probably not enough bandwidth to worry about, but it's just the spirit of the bandwidth pirate that bothers me.

So I went off to see what I could do. I basically can only modify the .htaccess file as opposed to the Apache config file (boy I miss having my own server). I Google search later and I found what I needed to add to the .htaccess file to prevent the site from linking to my images:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(boards.)?countryweekly.com [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpe?g|gif)$ - [NC,F]

I went back to the message board and the pic doesn't show up any longer, so it looks like it worked! So, if anyone else needs a little help to keep people linking to your images, try the above in your .htaccess file [changing (boards.)?countryweekly.com to (www.)?badsite.com where appropriate].

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