Sometimes forlorn young girls (and, occasionally "football dudes") link to the images on my server in their blogs. Usually they're just using one of the ugly pictures of me in a joke posting, or one of my forlorn handwritten notes. Occasionally they use the image as a background (and I'll never understand that one).
Whatever the case, they're stealing my bandwidth. I don't really care if they use the images, but my bandwidth has scarcity and I'd like to use as much of it for my own purposes as possible, especially since I've already got so much fun spam using my bandwidth already.
So, I troll my access log and see what kind of referring pages I'm getting, and to what they're referring. When I see links to my images directly, I visit the "offending" site, decide if one of my stock images is already well suited for the application or if a custom new one needs to be made, I modify my original HTML and change the image's name, and finally symlink in a new image. After this is all done, I go back and visit their site to see how it changed.
I'm changing my routine, thought. I'm going to take a screenshot of the "before" and "after" now, and post a link here. This is more for my own enjoyment and documentation than anything else. There have been several very good image-swaps that I almost forgot about, like that time that somebody linked to my "Hey everybody, I'm a jerk..." image in a thread collecting "stop stealing my bandwidth" messages from all over the net... *snicker*
So, tonight we have Mr. Armucheefootball56 from Xanga. I actually made a custom image just for him, since he really doesn't fit the profile of my usual bandwidth theft.
Before:
After:
