The Blog Answerman

Okay, time for an important lesson for new bloggers and one that can sometimes be painful to learn on your own.  Today’s post is about a process known as hotlinking.

In particular we need to discuss the process of hotlinking to images on someone else’s server without their express consent.  For starters, it is stealing and although it happens every day it is illegal to do so.  Beyond that, such links can cause your page to load more slowly for the end users.

It was brought to my attention today that a new blogger used a hotlink for an image on their blog only to have their readers greeted by a pornographic image later.  That’s a common practice for people who have their images used without permission, so you can see it is a big problem.  On top of that, it costs the image owner money because you are using their server resources and they aren’t getting anything for it.

There’s a simple solution, so pay attention kids!

Instead of hotlinking to an image on another server, upload the image to your Today.com blog web space.  You have 100 MB of space just waiting to be used and all you have to do is click the text link below your blog entry box marked “Upload/Insert and Image?” and follow the instructions there to upload the image you  want to use right from your computer.

A final word of caution to cover your butts: Don’t steal.  There are plenty of photos on the ‘net that are available for free download.  If you use someone’s image - with permission or without - the proper etiquette is to give the photographer or image owner credit for the image somewhere in your post.  Many times that’s all that the image owner wants.

Still, you always need to upload your images to the Today.com server so that it will speed up the load time of your page!

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