This morning we were joining the ring road when we saw a car parked on the side of road (where Gosford Street turns into Far Gosford Street) with a strange camera-like attachment on the roof. I wondered whether it was one of the Google cars - this was confirmed by the small 'Google' logo on the door.
Yesterday I mentioned using the .htaccess file with Apache to prevent people hot-linking images. That would only be a temporary solution, which would stop current hot-links from working. Any future image theft would involve people downloading images and re-uploading them somewhere else.
I've had a problem recently with people stealing images from my website - either hot-linking them or re-uploading them to other sites. My first attempt to stop this was by modifying the .htaccess file on the web server, telling it to only allow image requests from recognised places.
A colleague in work was trying to log into a website but it wouldn't accept her password. She clicked on the Can't Login? link to see what options were available. This took her to the bug reporting screen which required her to log in first! All rather stupid but she did manage to log in in the end.
That's not the only thing wrong with the website but possibly the silliest thing is to do with the meta tags in the <head> section of the web pages. The meta keywords tag is often used to help search engines index the pages. The only page which is visible to a search engine is the 'log in' screen but this doesn't have the meta tags. These are on the pages which can only be reached after logging in, where they would be invisible to a search engine. Even better than that is the list of keywords. This starts off sensible enough but ends with "Add more here....".
There are few things more pathetic on a website than a Best Viewed With Internet Explorer icon. To me, it suggests that the designer was too lazy to make sure that their site followed the proper HTML specification. Especially when the site is a very simple one and doesn't use any advanced (or IE specific) features. Sites should be viewable with as many different browsers as possible. The WWW existed long before Microsoft woke up and decided to join in, and with the increase in people accessing web pages from mobile devices, it is become more important to make pages viewable in other browsers. These days, it's just plain rude to design a page with only Internet Explorer in mind.
