A much larger version of this image is currently showing as the background of numerous myspace, xanga, livejournal and friendster pages right now. Why? Because these people chose to hot-link to the wallpaper I offer on my website. Some of them I tried to email and ask them nicely but they never listen and now, there are just too many of them.

February 21st, 2007 update:

I think I may have solved my hotlinking problems.  I put all my wallpaper up on Flickr instead of linking to the full size images here.  Each wallpaper blog has a link to the Flickr page where the wallpaper can be hotlinked or downloaded.

For your convenience, here is a link to my Flickr page:

Greenfreak’s Flickr page

What’s hotlinking? Hotlinking is when you are on an internet page and you insert an image from my webpage by using the URL. You know, that’s that address that starts with http and ends with .jpg. This can be done by using the IMG or IMG SRC tags before the URL.

Why is hotlinking bad? Because every time you spell out my URL in order to reproduce my content on another webpage (such as setting my wallpaper as your website’s background), you are doing two things; stealing bandwidth and stealing copyrighted material.

What’s bandwidth theft? My website is “hosted” by a company. I rent space from them and in turn, they give me a public place on the internet to show my website. That includes bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data that is transferred between people viewing my content and my website’s host. I only pay for a certain amount. If I go over that amount, guess what? They charge me more.

So when I have all these people from myspace, xanga, livejournal and friendster finding my wallpaper and hotlinking to it, they are using my bandwidth each and every time someone loads their page. Last month alone, that included over 30,000 times my bandwidth was being used by these people. If I left this unchecked, that could start costing me some bucks.

What’s copyright theft? So many people think anything that is found on the internet is free for the taking. That right-clicking on a picture and saving it is ok. It’s not. Photos are copyrighted the minute they are taken on the camera. So when you save my photos to your computer, you are stealing copyrighted material. When you put it on your own webpage without my consent and without giving me credit, it’s also stealing. The only material I specifically allow people to download is the wallpaper that has my copyright information on it.

So what do you do with all this information? Be respectful of people’s hard work and don’t hotlink, steal their bandwidth and reproduce their copyrighted material without their permission. Instead, use a link to the original material on their page. Like this: http://www.greenfreak.net/

That way, people can come here and see what you want them to see. It covers all the bases and makes people like me very very happy.

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