The importance of choosing the right font

[Joe]

To me it seems this effect was intentional.

You have to admit, it's a catchy sign.


And yeah, if the Cellar would host images (it hosts the attachments anyway, so the storage overhead is the same) we could avoid this attachment nonsense.

[Undertoad]

I suppose, but I can't think of a faster way to use all my bandwidth than to run a free image hosting service.

I could do the work to figure out how to refuse to serve images unless they're requested by pages here. But I'm tired, and all this reconfiguring to manage security and bandwidth problems that don't exist yet is really frustrating over the long run.

in other words, bugger off!

seriously though...

And yeah, if the Cellar would host images (it hosts the attachments anyway, so the storage overhead is the same) we could avoid this attachment nonsense.

Hard drives are cheap. Storage overhead is nothing. A measly T1 is ~$2,000 per MONTH. You could buy a terabyte of storage for that price. Every MONTH.

I like the fact that the attachments are shown as they are for two reasons: 1) it means there aren't a ton of images on a page that I don't want to see, and 2) it keeps Tony's bandwidth usage down (because 200 people aren't re-downloading the image every 10 minutes when they reload the thread). The Cellar is free; it's a good discussion board and it's a gift to us from Tony. I think the least we can do is find another place to host all the damn images we throw up in this thread.

Also note that Tony's pipe that he hosts the Cellar on is the same line he uses for internet access - when he gets overloaded, his personal internet access slows to a crawl.

[Undertoad]

Good points up to the last one. Unlike a lot of connection types, a T1 has the same bandwidth incoming and outgoing and it's all asynchronous. Unlike modems, it doesn't have to stop transmitting in one direction in order to transmit in the other direction. So I can download to my heart's content even if the outgoing bandwidth is all taken up.

And you can bet I do

[juju]

when i post images, i just upload the image to my free university webspace and link to it from there.

But, hey, why not create a geocities account and host the image there? It's a lot of work I know, but it's still cool to be able to share images with people. :]

[juju]

ok, here's a geocities account for us to use.

username: cellardotorg
password: undertoad

Just point your browser to www.geocities.com and log in. There are even web-based admin tools for uploading.

And don't change the password!

[juju]

[http://www.geocities.com/cellardotorg/megaflicks.jpg]




yeah baby. that's right. who's your daddy?

[Undertoad]

"We're sorry, but this page is currently unavailable for viewing." - Geocities error message

[Xugumad]

IIRC, Geocities/Yahoo recently modified its access policy so you can't use it to store images and link to them from another site. It checks the referrer, and if it comes from a non-Geocities site, it refuses the connection.

AKA, broken link time.

I think most of the other big 'free webspace' sites such as Xoom, Tripod etc. did the same thing.

Understandable, really: they get 0% revenue from images linked from another site, unlike their banner-based free website hosting. They pay for the bandwidth and storage.

X.

[elSicomoro]

I learned that the hard way about 2 months ago. I need to get my site off Tripod one of these days.

[Undertoad]

What kind of hosting tools does Tripod give you?

[juju]

wait a second...now the image is there. I don't get it..... I don't think the refferrer check thing is exactly right..'cause now i DO see the image. Maybe their server was just overloaded or something?

GeoCities checks the referer. Period.

Watch: click the link. It won't work.

Now: click the address bar so it either selects the URL or makes an insertion point. Then press the Enter/Return key on your keyboard. Blammo! It works. Why? Last page GeoCities.

Unfortunately, GeoCities == turds. Not that I don't understand - I do. That's why I haven't put up an ftponly account on my server for you guys to upload images to

Tony - My bad. I was under the impression that you, like me, play way too much [Quake III Arena | Unreal Tournament | Et Cetera] online and would notice that. If my bandwidth spikes for a second, I lag for about 5 - drives me nuts. But yeah. I guess if you're just downloading, then you've gots no problem

[Joe]

Yeah, I recall when GeoCities used to give you like 2 megs for a homepage. What I would do is then just create as many other accounts as I needed, and link my homepage to images stored there, for a page as huge as I wanted. Later, when I started writing pages on other servers, I would still use GeoCities as my image repository when I really needed them.

That was about 3 years ago, in the "before time", aka pre-dot.bomb era, when it was also easy to spoof your client to the top of a search engine's results using some very simple tricks.

<sigh>

It was all easy money for someone with very little skill, but as with so many things it was only cool when few were doing it. When it became mainstream, and nobody ran an honest search, and GeoCities was hosting millions of parasite images, it became too much to ignore and the web admins did what we most feared all those years: They added a few lines of code that made it all stop.

<sigh again>

Now we've lost something, we've lost that open disk space that made even a poor man look like a bigshot online without even having an account, the tools that let a web designer with hours or days of experience land big money contracts, and even things like Napster, where impoverished folks worldwide could suddenly bask in the glories of a music collection worthy of the richest yuppie.

...hurts too much to remember....

...the way we.....were............

<tears>

OK I'm done. Jesus.

I'm really too lazy to do this next part on my own, but does Geocities allow redirect tags? What about making a GeoCities account that just redirects to the page with the image? Wouldn't you then have a GeoCities page as your last visited page?

[juju]

Originally posted by dhamsaic
GeoCities checks the referer. Period.

Watch: click the link. It won't work.

Now: click the address bar so it either selects the URL or makes an insertion point. Then press the Enter/Return key on your keyboard. Blammo! It works. Why? Last page GeoCities.
you're just downloading, then you've gots no problem

When I click on the link, it works. I don't know why it doesn't work for anyone else. But i tested it on Netscape 4.7 on a Sun Workstation at school, Konqueror and Mozilla on Linux at home, and IE 5.5 on Windows at home.

I do have a junkbuster proxy at home, but when I turn it off the link still works. And that doesn't explain why it works at school.

Still..i believe you guys when you say it doesn't work for you. I just don't understand why, though.