Thanks, and good luck in those tournaments!
What have I been up to? Lol. Well, I'm working on my PhD research, but yesterday I also did something else, which I think was quite funny. XD
You see, a few months ago I was checking out my webstats and I noticed that I was getting quite a few refers from this site called 'Kupika'. Well, whenever I see hits coming in from a site I don't know, I usually go check it out, because if someone is linking to me, I like to see if there is a way I can say thanks.
Turns out this wasn't actually someone who was linking to me. This was the site:
kupika.com/Blazy/addopt_a_pokemonIt was a community site, and one of the members called 'Blazy', was there handing out Pokémon plushies. One of them was the Blaziken Plushie I got from Suta-Raito.com, which I have displayed on my bio page.
And the reason I was getting hits from this site was because this person was direct linking to me! Now, you may not know this but in the internet world, direct linking is very rude.
To understand this, you need to know a few things about the internet first, though. The internet is essentially held together by a truckload of giant computers called servers. These servers contain the various websites, including mine. Every time you want to access a website, your home computer sends out a request to the appropriate server, for the required files to display the website on your browser. A website consists of several files you see. There's the html-file for the site itself, the stylesheet, which determines the looks. Then there's also all of the images, which also are one file each. To display all of this on your browser, your computer needs to download the files from the server and store them in its temporary internet files. In some cases, your computer also uploads a little information to the server. In my case, blue-uncia uses a cookie to support the styleswitcher, and that's about it.
Well, all of this traffic from and to a server is called 'bandwidth', and a webmaster like me pays the webhost who owns the server, to be able to use it.
Now, when someone direct links at you, that means they have isolated a path to one particular file, in this case it was an image, and have imbedded that path as code in the sourcecode of their own website. If someone visits that website, the image will load normally, as if it belongs there, but in reality the other person´s server is contacting my server and requesting the image, thus using my bandwidth.
It's basically like leeching off your neighbour's wireless internet connection, without asking for permission of paying them. Now you may begin to understand why it's so rude to direct link; not just rude actually, it's also stealing. A lot of people just don't realize this. Now I have a great webhost. I get tons of bandwidth and harddrive space and I only have to pay very little for it.
So that's why I didn't make too much of a fuss over it at first. I figured it was probably just some stupid teenager or something, who was just trying to get some attention. If you check out the website, you'll see she also hosted a bunch of other plushies which she ripped (and direct linked) from a website called pokeplushies.com. She doesn't specifically say so, but she does imply that she is making them herself, by 'taking orders'. Kinda weird, but oh wel...
Anyway, over the last few months I saw the number of hits steadily increase, which indicated that the website was getting more popular. It was still only costing me a fraction of my bandwidth - I get a whopping 30 GB of the stuff every month - but I was starting to get uneasy because of it. It's a matter of principle, really. It's not nice, it's illegal and if everybody starts doing it, I might eventually end up having a problem after all. I'm not Imageshack, darn it!
So I did some thinking and realized I could just alter the path name. This would break the direct link and their website would just load with one of those annoying icons where an image is supposed to go, but can't be found.
But there'd be no way to be sure she wouldn't just come back to my site and ferret out the new path. So I changed the path to the plushie and placed the following image in stead of the old one. So rather than loading the plushie every time, her website loaded this:
I kinda messed up their lay-out in doing so and because the plushie was right at the top of her list, I'm sure it must have caused some panic here and there.
That was yesterday. Today I checked out her page again and behold: the image has been taken down! I guess the girl can be fast after all. Maybe this was a little childish of me, but all in all I thought it was quite lolsome.