I don't know half of you half as well as I should like;
and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.
There are going to be some changes coming to lotrfanatic.com in the coming weeks. Some of them will hopefully be good, some of them could be very detrimental. First of all, I just got an e-mail from the company I pay for webhosting. For those of you who don't know what that is, they have computers that hold on to my data and you access them to view my webpage. Long story short, they say that I haven't paid my bill, despite me having paid it a month ago and it showed up on my credit card statement. It is possible that they won't work this out and they'll suspend my account, at which time I will move to another host and do my best to get my money back. Of course I don't have all the time in the world to worry about such silliness so who knows how soon if my site goes down I will have it back up.
On the plus side, I plan on a revamp of my website with a new style. It will be a nice lotr theme and it will be a welcome change I think. I will also be rolling out a photo gallery at the same time, with the same theme. The gallery will be password protected so that photos aren't spread around the internet and they can be kept within the circle of my friends. This is a point that I'd like to put out there in that - if any of you have any pictures from camp, or from other activities and would like to back them up in a way that would give friends access to them let me know and I will add them at the given time.
Also there are a bunch of you out there who are more creative than me. If you have any cool ideas for my site, I would be more than happy to work on implementing them if I can. I think the shared photo gallery will be quite helpful, but beyond that I am open to most any suggestion to improve the site. Put your thinking caps on, despite what Baptists think, some change is good. ;-)
have all your LotR pix be from "The Hobbit" BBC cartoon; or from the "LotR Cartoons."
lol... you can add to the robots.txt a line that will prevent them from cataloging your pictures. Thats what I do with mine. Its a bit simpler too
It's not just about keeping search engines from cataloging pictures, it's about not having everyone's pictures available to the world via the internet. It's a security issue and it's about keeping only people who are allowed to view pictures to view the pictures.
if your pictures are on the internet to begin with, you've already signed away the rights to them.
The more realistic approach is to ask all people in a picture for permission to use it on the site.
http authentication (the only way to secure a file that is non-programmed) isn't 100%, since when you upload a picture, it is cached on every server in between, and every time someone views it, its cached on all those servers too.
We're not talking about 100% security, just putting an extra layer up. Let's not turn this into a who's right about security flame war either.
The fact of the matter is I want more security than just putting a robots.txt so I am going to implement that security. Honestly can't you ever just let well enough alone.
Bah, is everyone bickering these days?!
I'm just trying to clue you in on a simpler and more legally-adhering method. Gosh.
nerblet - who ever said I wanted simple hmmm?
lol - anyway, like I said it's just throwing another layer of security up, and I don't see more security as a bad thing.
Plus part of my plan is to create a sub-gallery, where people will be given permission to post their own images to which would be approved by me. This wouldn't be a good idea without a login system.
the only problem is that that sort of permission granting can't be done with http auth. If you try something with php, thats great, but it doesn't cover the images.
unless you want to shove the image binary into the db, which isn't a smart thing.
This is of course true, fortunately with my hosting provider I can do secure http connections. :-)
Thats not what I mean, the files will still be sitting in a non-protected folder.
Ah so that's your issue. My gallery program doesn't store the images on a locally accessible folder. I'll show it to you sometime if you're interested - it's quite nifty.
The long and the short of it is they're not within the /www/ directory.
Wow... amusing argument there... and about half of it went over my head... =P You know, in java class they teach you how to make a pointless program that sells virtual trucks (for free if you make a typo), but they don't teach you all this nifty stuff about security...
yay! A new layout! Something with a bit more graphics to it would be nice... That picture idea sounds pretty nifty too, despite the battle it initiated... =P Other than that, I don't have any ideas at this point in time...
ditto..on the over you head thing!
someday those changes will happen. which may or may not include a blog post sometime
lol - maybe ;-)
Actually I've been meaning to post all week but haven't gotten around to it. The changes may or may not begin within the next week and a half though fyi.
so whats the deal with us never getting tagged on this random thing? I feel so left out