| LED Digest 2022: Who to Hire? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest post, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. September 8, 2005 Issue #2022 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Who to Hire? ==-- ~ Mark Rogers "I am trying to decide between hiring a company to create the website or just...hiring a contractor..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Dealing with Image Theft ==-- ~ James Miller "There is also a positive side to this." ~ John Charles "It may be worthwhile watermarking your images or digitally signing them..." ~ Scott Marino "We have had competitors take our images... and use them on their sites..." ~ Cheryl Berry "...the changed images will also appear in cache results for your site." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== URL Redirects and Google ==-- ~ Ian Smith ======= NEW ===================================== From: Mark Rogers Subject: Web Company or Contractor for New Site? In the near future I will start work on a new ecommerce website. I am trying to decide between hiring a company to create the website or just acquiring some shopping cart software and then hiring a contractor to help install / modify it, and then create the other pages. My current site is with a company with their own proprietary shopping cart and they have me locked into their hosting company and their gateway company. I do not like this. None of the existing shopping carts support the features I need so I will require modification to what ever shopping cart I end up with. So far I have only seen one company that appears to be able to provide the more complicated features I need and will give me 100% ownership of the site. Most companies just want to shoehorn me into their version of OScomerce or Zen cart and do not appear to have ability to add the features I need. That is why I am also looking into possibly buying something like Miva which appears to have extensive support for modification and then hiring a contractor. I would appreciate any advice on the various pros and cons of these approaches. Thanks, Mark Rogers http://www.framedestination.com ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: James Miller Subject: Image stealing > ... some images are being used (ie referenced direct so > they are using our image on our hosting - not copied to > their own server) by other sites... Is there an easy way > to stop this? - Emma Mackintosh, LED 2018 There is also a positive side to this. Well not really stealing. All of the images on my web sites can be used by others providing that they give me a credit. As most of these are pictures I took myself I don't really care, but is it an interesting way of getting extra visitors to your site. Another point is that I've been using JAlbum in a client's web site to create an image gallery for their products. http://www.coverwellcoatings.co.uk/gallery.html The next step is to write a piece of software to create an image gallery that is driven by a spreadsheet, so that you can sell directly of the image gallery. All you'll need to do is add a line in the spreadsheet and then put the image into a directory and run the software. The idea is really to give the client an easy way of updating his site himself, but as you're the project manager hopefully you'll get the difficult bits. James Miller Daisy Analysis www.daisy.co.uk -------- new post - same topic --------- From: John Charles Subject: Image stealing Hi All, After reading many many posts at last a post I can contribute to! Emma a quick, permanent and easy fix is to add a few lines of code to your ".htaccess" file on your web server if you don't have this file in the root of your web directory then you should create it. Please note it is not a typo the file is called '.htaccess' without the apostrophes i.e no file name before the file extension and works on Apache based web servers. The file should contain the following lines of code: ---------------------- RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?YourDomain.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.YourDomain.com/Alternative.gif [R,L] ---------------------- Replace 'YourDomain.com' with your own domain name. Replace 'Alternative.gif' with an image of your own; possible ideas for this image are: 1. Create an image with the text words images on this site stolen from 'YourDomain.com' 2. Create an alternative image and bloat the image size to say 100mb. upload it to a free web host there's plenty around and watch as the persons site takes for ever to load in a browser! It'll probably take them a while to figure what's going on before they wise up and use there own images. the file should be uploaded in ASCII mode and chmod 644 One point to note though is if the web owner / designer is so lazy as not to to create their own images they may just visit your site and copy the images and then upload them to their own web space once the figure what's going on. It may be worthwhile watermarking your images or digitally signing them so that later if necessary you can easily prove copyright infringement. To see a working example of this in action you can visit my site at www.events2order.co.uk and try hot linking to any of the images if you have any problems creating the .htaccess file use the online web mail form to contact me Regards John Charles http://www.events2order.co.uk ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Scott Marino Subject: Image stealing Most of the remedies listed so far have been for images where the image is still hosted on your site. We have had competitors take our images, rename them, and use them on their sites or on Ebay. Many will remove the images once they get a phone call or an e-mail. Of course, some will insist that they can use any images and will ignore any requests to remove them. You can do a whois look-up (I use http://www.dnsstuff.com) to find the contact info including name, address, phone number and e-mail address of the owner of the domain name. Many have listed their home phone numbers of e-mail address and are rather shocked when the phone rings. Ebay has a program called Verified Rights Owner (VERO) to handle this situation. You have to send them a legally binding letter with specific wording (they help with the wording) to get on the VERO list. They do check things out so not everyone can get on the list. Once on the list, a specific form e-mail to Ebay is all that is needed to have them pull a listing that is displaying any images you assert ownership of. Most listings are pulled the same day the e-mail is sent. For other sites, the process takes a little longer but is equally effective. For this, I use http://www.dnsstuff.com and do a "reverse dns look-up" of the domain name. That gives the ip address for the site. You can then do a "whois lookup" on the ip address to see what hosting company owns the ip address. The whois lookup lists the contact info, one of which should be a technical contact. I generally start with contacting them. Most hosting companies have some sort of form or letter that they require to be sent before taking action. The form usually goes to their legal department or a lawyer they have retained. Once they get the letter, the images will eventually be pulled. In my experience, contacting the hosting company has been highly effective at getting the images pulled from those that don't want to listen to my phone calls or letters. Scott Marino www.webundies.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Cheryl Berry Subject: Image stealing The consequences of changing images is that the changed images will also appear in cache results for YOUR site. Deleting the old images is a much safer solution if you get a good deal of cache hits to your site. (Been there - done that.) Cheryl Berry ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Ian Smith Subject: URL redirects and ranks I was wondering if any of you knew any research that had been done on this: How do URL redirects, such as those from http://xents.com, impact Google page ranks? Can I use them for tracking purposes and still receive a good page rank? There are other service too (such as http://tinyurl.com) but I was more interested in the tracking aspect of redirects. Any ideas? Thanks! Ian Smith ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. To keep the peace, we and our allies must be strong enough to convince any potential aggressor that war could bring no benefit, only disaster." - Ronald Reagan |
