Busy — Thu, 26 Sep 2002 21:21:25 +0000

Thanks, the site was offered as a zip, but since I am updating ALL the content I removed it for now.

ROB — Thu, 26 Sep 2002 10:57:54 +0000

hey Busy, i just checked out your HTML site for the first time and it looks like you really did a very good comprehensive "even morons can learn HTML" type tutorial. This is the type of explicit walkthrough beginners want, and theyre going to try to save the site to disk no matter how you try to prevent them. Take it as a compliment, and offer a zipped version of the site for download. At least you'll get a break on the bandwidth.

Busy — Thu, 26 Sep 2002 09:45:25 +0000

problem with log files is they are cleared every few days, seems to get to about 2 mb then wiped, lately been having a lot of crawling and site saving going on (people using programs to download the whole site), added a robots file to block the known ones, will have to wait and see what happens.

as for the htaccess file, I have:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?munchtech.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.munchtech.com/humour4u/blank.gif [R,L]

this file (.htaccess) is in the folder the images are being linked from. just had a thought, would the htaccess file be better served in the main directory rather than the folder of the images being linked?
because linking to any image still displays it

zollet — Thu, 26 Sep 2002 02:44:53 +0000

Actually, you can prevent hot-linking with .htaccess, I can give you the lines if you want to.

ROB — Thu, 26 Sep 2002 01:55:02 +0000

apache logs should tell you the url of the requested file that was not found.

also, you said it was 'a few' 404s. If it's just a few, it's probably people typing in the wrong url, or with outdated bookmarks, or hotlinks to images that have been deleted or moved. 404's are normal, you can't really prevent them. All you can do is make sure your own documents dont link non-existent files. I wouldn't worry about it unless it's much more than a few.

As far as your question, i'm far from an apache expert but i do know putting an .htaccess file in every directory is bad news. Apache has to parse every .htaccess file in every directory leading to the requested file, every time it's requested.