A long time ago - 2003 to be exact - I noticed that images from fourhman.com were popping up as avatars on various forums around the internet. Not really a big deal, except that it artificially inflates my monthly pageview stats and could potentially cost me money in bandwidth costs. So I starting switching out innocent graphics with less-than-innocent graphics, but that really doesn't solve the problem.

Sometime after that, I put in an htaccess file that blocks anybody and everybody from hot-linking to images that live on fourhman.com. It's easy to do and a million other people could explain it to you better, so if you're interested in it, go check it out someplace else.

Of course, this now stops me from linking to my own images that I want to use on internet forums... so this week I did a little more research and figured out how to have everything blocked except one little public folder. Again, you can have fun looking that one up on your own. (Start here.)

I also finally got around to fixing the image that appears whenever somebody thinks they're smart and links out to fourhman.com anyway. Which means you get a lot of stuff like this:

No longer pictures of Mappy, it's now free advertising.

Happens in French too:

That's from a French weblogger's site. You'd think he'd notice that.

This one is the greatest, however. FOURHMAN.COM VS. JUGGERNAUT!

The reason behind all this flurry of htaccess activity was the ceremonial opening of my MySpace page, because I wanted to post a bunch of my own banner ads on it. Not that I'm really all that interested in MySpace - jesus fuck, I own my own domain name - just that I know a fair amount of other people who are on it, and I hope that it would point interested parties over here to this site. Where all the awesome happens.