Giving the Suckers a Mouthful
A few days ago, I went through my referrer logs, and found that my photography and image collecting is enjoying(?) a dubious kind of success: people like my images so much, that I found at least six culprits that are linking my images and stealing bandwidth from me. Adding insult to injury, they don't credit my images. Most of them are using the images to illustrate their own points/comments on bulletin boards.

I found out that it's a pretty simple matter to block bandwidth suckers from hot-linking my images. You add a set of directives to the .htaccess file that only allow your domain to use the images. Otherwise, a banwidth-sucker image is returned.

My bandwidth-sucker JPEG reads “UH-OH! BANDWIDTH SUCKER DETECTED. visit beansaboutit.com.” The file is small, so not as much bandwidth gets sucked, and it becomes an ad for my site.

I didn't get the comparison string right the first time. The result was that it blocked images from showing up on this blog. I'm also thinking there may be a few other domains that I want to allow to hotlink my images. I'm waiting to hear back from support on how to tweak the directive.

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Use it or Lose it
The “nuclear option” must be blocked. It's amazing to me that the discussion has gotten this far. I know an obscenity when I see one.

This Wednesday, the Democratic Party and allied organizations will present more than 1 million petition signatures to Senate Democrats as a sign of support and public opposition to the Republican power grab. You must sign our petition today if you want your name presented to our leaders in the Senate:

http://www.democrats.org/freespeech

This is what we risk. By silencing Democrats on the Senate floor, Republicans will easily approve all of President Bush's extreme right-wing judicial nominees, giving them lifetime appointments to the federal bench – no matter what their records look like. This puts all of our values we hold dear – civil liberties, voting rights, a woman's right to choose, education, environmental protections – at grave risk.

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Working with CSS
is getting easier. I'm finding that tweaking layouts is pretty easy, once you have the underlying CSS structured right. The iffy part is getting the design working in the first place. It seems that if you want to align groups of objects side by side, you pretty much have to use table cells – As far as I can tell, there's no way to instruct <div>s to line up side by side.

I had thought that display:inline would do that, but I have found that display:block and display:inline are not precise opposites. Using display:block will make objects that normally display inline (e.g. images) stack up nicely, eliminating the need for 1-column tables to produce interfaces like vertical menus. However, display:inline still allows elements to wrap. If there's a way to suppress wrapping, maybe something interesting can happen. Meanwhile, I'm still using admittedly simpler table structures to provide skeletal support to my page designs.

In the end, it's satisfying to see the designs rendered precisely, without a single extra spacer GIF. The source code looks a LOT cleaner, too.