I've been wondering why my site fares so well in google searches for slayer, but my post about slayer gets zero traffic. Apparently it's some danish idiot hotlinking the photo (see chart). And a couple myspace idiots, not realizing that I got the original from myspace, and hotlinking mine, rather than using the original properly.

So far, I'm realizing that the hotlink ban doesn't prevent the danish forum from from poluting my logs. I'm also having difficulty determining if the block is actually working. for everything else, though, the logs work amazingly. Especially at catching my typos.

The .htaccess rules I'm using are:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?ddforum\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g)$ /images/hotlink.$1 [L]
</IfModule>

Which seems to only make the hotlinked image go away, not actually replace it with my south-park-plus-web2.0-gradient image. boo.

The main reason i switched was that i wanted was to be able to move wordpress into the top level directory, from /blog/. so i figured i'd try and do it all in one fell swoop. what's more fun than trying to do something "mission critical" in a language you've just learned? so here's what i added to my .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RedirectMatch 301 /blog/index.php/(.*) /blog/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /blog/wp-content/(.*) /wp-content/$1
</IfModule>

the first line is for old URL's. the second line is for anything i uploaded and referenced in a post (especially images). so far both seem to be working. (i found the RedirectMatch example on this page). And, since you're reading this, the CNAME record seems to have been set up, although i had to file a support ticket for that.

UPDATE: i forgot that i'd also added a prefix to my permalink structure (/blog/) so my redirects were all failing. should be fixed now (code updated)