Folks of the Internet, I want you to know — this blog has finally arrived. I, your humble author, have gotten hate mail.

As is my personal rule for any twink who wants to send me a nasty letter, I’m going to post it here for everyone else to laugh at. Now, don’t get me wrong — if you write me an email and have a legitimate bitch about my blog, an argument with my viewpoints or content, or an issue — I’m not going to publicly humiliate you. However, if you resort to homosexual epitaphs to make your point, you will be labeled an asshat and strung up for all to gawk at.

Here’s the mail I received earlier today (posted as a comment):

your best friend | biteme@youblow.com | IP: 69.139.157.104
I just wanted to let you know how gay you actually are. I searched an image on google and found one I thought was pretty funny. It happened to come from your website. Yet for some reason you think I should have to ask you to link to it. As if your some brilliant person for putting some text on top of a picture of a donkey. I wasn’t profitting off of it. It was meant as a joke on a fantasy football page. Yet you felt the need to be gay enough to to replace the picture with some gay ass message. Just wanted to stop by and thank you for being such a fag.

Wow. Here’s a news bulletin: the use of the words, “gay”, “fag”, and “gay ass” don’t really hold the same weight that they used to back in the 80s when they were the nomenclature of middle school children. Today you might find more mileage out of the words, “fucky”, “shittard”, and “cockmaster”, but I don’t recommend you strain your weak braincells on the complexities of their proper usage.

Despite the fact that this letter just reeks of a wankstain in mustard-stained sweats drinking Milwaukee’s Best, I’m going to attempt to educate both this dork and my general population as to what “hotlinking” is all about and why it’s a bad thing, mmmkay? Hotlinking is when you see a graphic on someone else’s website and you use it on yours, but you don’t actually download that graphic and upload it to your site, you simply link to it from another site. The net effect of this is that the graphic is loaded from the original site every time the site you posted it on is loaded.

While the spirit of sharing on the Internet is alive and well, people who have websites pay for the bandwidth that they use. If other sites are using up bandwidth because they’re loading images off of your server, you’re going to be pretty annoyed. On top of that, when images are hotlinked, the original website that hosts the image never gets any credit for that image — nobody visits the original site, because the visitors to the hotlinking site can’t see where the images came from! All in all, it’s a Bad Thing(tm).

So, yes, the other day I implemented some code changes that detect when an image is being hotlinked and replaces it with another image. I noticed this dork’s hotlinked image (because it was loaded by his football site a lot) and knew that it would start being replaced by an alternate image. Frankly, I don’t give a wet slap if he thinks I’m a loser. The issue isn’t that I wanted credit for making the graphic, because I didn’t even make that original image. The fact was that my webserver doesn’t deserve being hit for his site’s amusement when I’m not benefitting from it. I have real visitors that deserve better.

My original hotlinking image was a bit rude, I’ll admit, but it got the point across. So, to combat the rudeness and educate the offenders, I’ve made a new graphic, which I’m posting to the right. Perhaps I can finally get into these folks’ thick skulls the problems associated with hotlinking graphics and make the world a better place by providing free education. A win-win situation, don’t you think?