An apology to my feed readers

This publish is an apology to my feed readers. As a result of a misconfiguration of my server, for a couple of hours, photographs in my feed have been changed with a message that advised to “cease stealing content material and bandwidth”. That message was meant to be seen on websites that steal my content material/bandwidth, not in your feed reader. It was a trustworthy mistake on my half, and for this I’m actually sorry. My feed readers are my regulars and I care about them. The truth is, all of the content material I write will get syndicated to my feed in its entirety in order that my readers don’t have to go away their feed reader.

The opposite day I seen that numerous bandwidth consumption was attributable to exterior websites who had republished a few of our content material with out permission. It seems that many of those spammers have been “hotlinking”. In different phrases they didn’t copy the pictures on their very own servers, they merely linked to the unique on my servers, to be displayed on their websites. The tip result’s that they consumed my bandwidth, in an try and earn cash off my content material.

It’s doable to configure your server to switch every picture if the URL serving them just isn’t in your accredited listing. So I did simply that. I approved *.math-blog.com, a few my different websites, together with my programming weblog, and search engines like google. For these of you who’re into laptop programming: I merely wrote some rewrite guidelines and situations in my .htaccess file for the Apache internet server.

What went fallacious? My feeds are served by FeedBurner, a service that Google acquired a while in the past. I regretfully forgot so as to add Google’s service to the listing of accepted domains.

I’ve remedied this and every little thing needs to be again to regular now. Please settle for my apologies for the inconvenience.