Credit’s due when it’s due

I have just installed the hotlink builder plugin for WordPress. It provides a basic level of protection for the images on your blog from leechers visitors who come via Google and MSN looking for images. At least some of them are going to right-click on an image to use it in their own blogs, sites or myspace pages. This plugin displays a chunk of code they can copy and paste into their template or post to display the image. That code has a link to your blog which is much better than someone simply stealing your image and not giving credit.

It’s not perfect, but you can see it in action here. Right click on the image of the spire and James Joyce. A red bordered box will appear above it. Unfortunately if you right click on other images the box still appears in the exact same space which could be off-screen. I must try making it a popup div instead.

I also installed the small but useful break out of frames plugin. It simply breaks your blog out of foreign frames. Google Images is probably the worst offender of the referrers to this blog so hopefully it’ll encourage people to stay a bit longer here. Both plugins found via seobook.

Later… Some minor fixes required to make it work properly:

• Line 116 of hotlink-builder.php should be $src .= ' alt="' . get_bloginfo('blogname') . '"'; otherwise it’ll print your blog title before every post.
• WP-Cache needs to know about the cookie this plugin sets. Open up wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php and add the following code around line 72, in the function wp_cache_get_cookie_values():
  

  if( $_COOKE[ 'imagesearcher' ] == 'yes' ) $string .= 'searchengine';