Images elsewhere.

My monthly allotment of bandwidth is 95% gone here on the 15th, meaning I have to go purchase some a la carte gigabytes. Looking through my server logs, I see that a fair chunk of the excess traffic is due to images hosted here being hotlinked elsewhere. I've been pretty sanguine about this up 'til now, but with a new baby, one household salary still on maternity leave, and all the rest, I can't afford profligacy. Also, when the #1 site sucking down the bandwidth like a sailor on shore leave is Free Republic, well, it was fun replacing the unflattering images of Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry they were hotlinking with tubgirl and goatse (if you don't know, google will tell you but believe me, you don't want to know), but that doesn't really solve the bandwidth expense problem, y'know?

This is all to say that I have disabled hotlinking of images. I really didn't mind it with smaller sites but so it goes. One more example of the right-wingers ruining it for everybody. The other upshot is that if you usually read this site through a livejournal friends page, the images won't show up there either. Probably missing from the RSS feed as well, but I'm not sure about that. I guess you'll just have to click the link for the full visuals.