Hugo’s blog

There are many ways one can make money with a Web site: you can add ads around some content you produce (e.g. by publishing photos), point people to some products that they may be interested in buying as a result of visiting a site (e.g. by reviewing items), help people save money and take a cut (e.g. with Web hosting coupons).

However, all of this really works when people coming to your site are motivated enough that they’ll click on anything to get answers.

That’s what’s happening on my wife’s Web site right now. We had a bed bug issue in Paris a few years ago. That was an awful experience, and it was really tough to get rid of them (that required having a professional spray some very nasty chemicals twice, and we were not so far from throwing our bed and bedding away and moving apartments). You can see from the comments how desperate people can be when facing this problem, and they’re very happy to follow any link that could be helping them.

So the key is: write about problems. My dog pulled me off of my bike two weeks ago, and I hurt my hand and knee. I should have taken a photo…

A few months ago, I set up anti-leeching measures on my site as I was tired of people stealing my photos, both because they never ask, and because I was providing free bandwidth to all the MySpace junkies. I was looking where the request was coming from, and returning an error if it wasn’t from a legit source.

I later removed this, as bandwidth is basically free for me (DreamHost just doubled the quotas to 2TB/month, so I’ve got nothing to worry about on this side – see my DreamHost guide for more info).

Annotating photos with copyright information

So I was still bugged by the other side of the problem: people stealing my photos, not that they’re very valuable, but just as a matter of courtesy. I ended up finding another parade: annotating my images when they’re served from external sources.

Here is an example: my most popular photo (the one that even Alain de Botton enquired about for one of his books) ends up on various fora all the time:

So, if it’s linked from this blog, I serve it normally, and otherwise I annotate it with copyright information.

HttpCaching: now returning 304 Not Modified automatically

This is why I got more interested in HTTP caching in PHP a while back, as computing those images takes both time and CPU. HttpCaching now deals with returning 304’s automatically with version 0.5 that I just released, so well behaved HTTP clients should have a good experience.

If the PHP code for annotating photos is of any interest to people, I’ll look into making it available too. The issue is that there’s quite a few hard-coded things in it which make it not easy to reuse at this point.

I don’t like preventing people from linking to things on the Web. However, looking at my logs, I keep seeing people stealing both my photos (using them without asking or acknowledging them) and bandwidth (the most stolen photo uses more than 250MB of bandwidth each month).

So I decided to prevent people from linking to my photos. I’m sure it won’t stop people from stealing them, but at least I won’t be paying for it.

Web 2.0, Ajax: the community has discovered a new way of doing things and is bringing us lots of cool new sites and services.

As I read del.icio.us’s most popular list about a month ago, I saw that lots of people were impressed by AjaxWhois.com, a domain name lookup and Whois for most TLDs in a Web 2.0 fashion.

Today, people on Digg are very happy about another Whois service using the powers of Web 2.0.

In both cases, the service provided is one that existed before. It’s now done differently, with a better look and feel. However, in both cases, users are losing one core feature of the Web: you can’t bookmark results of what is a very simple query. You have to use a Web 1.0 Whois lookup service if you want to send a pointer to results a search.

Redoing things with Ajax and just giving them new names certainly seems very fashionable. However, while Ajax brings some really cool features in some contexts (e.g. the interface for editing photo metadata in Flickr), it really doesn’t belong everywhere.