There have been several cases of external websites embedding images from this website directly into their pages. Known as hotlinking, this results in bandwidth being used up on this website, for the traffic belonging to another website. Hotlinking is essentially stealing of bandwidth from another website, which someone else (or me, in the case of this website) has to pay for. Up until now I have been fairly relaxed about this, after all, some of these external pages were discussing projects on this website and providing inbound links. However, I have also had totally non-related websites hotlinking websites. Most recently, a classified listing on another website was using a photo of my old Compaq Presario in order to sell their item. Not only is this non-related traffic, but the photo shown in the advertisement was most certainly not of the item being sold; something that could be misleading to prospective buyers (it's clearly not a company promotional shot, so the assumption would be that it is the second hand item being sold). With this latest incident I decided that I was fed up with others stealing my bandwidth for non-related websites, and any page that hotlinks to this website now shows the following image:

Yesterday I noticed that someone had found my site by searching for "'_gat' is not an object". This search currently brings up one page which, is a blog entry on this site about XHTML, Firefox and Javascript. However, the visit was listed by Google Analytics as a "bounce," that is, the visitor viewed that one page, and then left my site. Most likely he/she moved on to the page on Weston Ruter's site that I linked to that contains a partial solution to the problem, written in Javascript. If this visitor had bothered to look further on this site, he/she would have discovered that a much simpler, and more effective, solution was presented in this blog post.