Okay, folks. For those of you who are using images from our site, please proceed. The rest of you can talk amongst yourselves.
Hi. I’ve never wanted to be one of those dickheads who did something like block people from using our images off our server. Because, at the time, it wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s real easy to put up some code that won’t fulfill requests from servers that aren’t needcoffee.com. But, like I said, I never wanted to do that.
The good news is this: I’m still not going to do that.
However…
We’ve grown. This site has been around in one form or another for ten years. And we’ve recently gotten a lot of new traffic (thank you!). I’m moving to a virtual private server as soon as I can get the damn thing setup. But regardless, we have lots of people coming and hammering our little server setup that we have. And while that’s cool when we can take it, when the people using our images comes on top of everything else and makes the site slow down–then we have issues.
This is especially true of stuff like really active MySpace pages. Or message boards. I see a lot of those.
So starting immediately, here’s my new image policy.
If you want to use an image off of our site, you can either
1) copy it onto your site and use it off your own server
or
2) continue using it but put this code around it:
That’s right. Just link to us with the image and I’m happy. Or link to us in your blogroll and I’m happy. I think that’s more than fair: all I’m asking is for some link love back. In fact, if you don’t know how to do this, ping me and I will help you.
However. If I see you’re using our image(s) and I go to the page it’s being used on and I can’t find a link back to us, then that image will either get pulled or that image will get magically turned into an ad for Needcoffee.com.
Bear in mind, if you’re hitting us once a day, then it’s not worth my time to even look your direction. But if I see lots of hits from your site, especially when I’m in the midst of a server slowdown, then I may have to take steps.
If you have had an image get zapped and would like it back, then just contact me. I’m not a dickhead (at least about this). I just want a little bit of return on my server strain. Or for it to go away. So. There you have it. As always, any questions or concerns, come see me.
