I’ve noticed that on a lot of forums people use big, elaborate animated .gif files for their profile image. I don’t make use of forums very often, so I’ve never really had use for such a thing, but I’ve always thought it would be fun to create one.
So, I found some good fight footage from Yu Yu Hakusho that would loop reasonably well and turned it into an animation. It would be cool if someday I saw someone using it. I’ll just post it here and see what happens. Here is the medium version:
96×96, 137k
There is a smaller and a much larger version of the same below the fold.
64×64, 61k
128×128, 225k
LATER: And now a longer, larger version. These are fun!
192×128, 640k
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Be prepared to have them directly link the copy on your server.
Oh, I am:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/images/no_hotlink.gif
:)
Not bad, but not as obnoxious as mine. (I made it 1024*4096 so as to blow out the formatting of a site which uses it.)
Brilliant!
I’ll do the same thing myself. In fact, I’ll just hotlink yours… erm. Oh wait.
Actually, I do think I’ll make some huge image and pull the same trick. I noticed referals from forums all the time in my logs, and I always thought it was someone mentioning my site. (i’m so naive) and it wasn’t until recently that I realized it was just people hotlinking my images.
Ok, one of the problems I was having was that I want to PROTECT .gif files. I could tell the server “don’t let people hotlink .gif files”. I could replace the hotlink with something else. But if I replaced it with yet another .gif file it wouldn’t work. My site would block it, since it was ALSO a gif. If I ran my own server or if the control panel had a little more functionality, I could probably pull it off. (You seem to have no problem doing it, so I know its possible one way or another.)
My solution was to redirect them to http://www.shamusyoung.com/images/no_hotlink.giff
The double ff on the end is deliberate. I don’t know if other browsers will handle it, but IE still detects that the file is a gif and is able to show it, but the name isn’t .gif so my hotlink blocker lets it through.
What’s a good tool for doing this sort of thing? I’ve wanted to try my hand at it, but I’ve yet to find a good program for creating animated .gif files.
I use Paint Shop Pro 8, which came with Animation Shop, which is a great tool for making animated gifs. However, Jasc – the company behind Paint Shop Pro – was bought out by Corel, which dropped Paint Shop Pro 8. They have a new version:
Here
But they have double the price, and turned the program into some crappy photo-sharing nonsense. PSP8 was a great rival to Photoshop, Corel’s version 10 looks like a joke. A simple program for moms and kids to play with their digital pictures.
I can’t stand Corel.
Shamus, I did the protecting by directory, rather than doing a single wholesale protection for the entire web tree. I have about four directories where I keep image files that I wanted to protect, and I set up a protection rule in the .htaccess file in each of those directories.
The one they redirect to (which I linked above) is in a directory where I do not have any such protection rule in the .htaccess file. That prevents me from having to do the stunt with the filename like you did.
Will, I used “Animation Shop 3”, a utility that was included with my copy of “Paint Shop Pro 8”. (PSP was developed and sold by a company called JASC, but recently it was acquired by Corel, who sell it now.)
I stand corrected. I just downloaded the demo of Paint Shop Pro X, and it is pretty much just like PSP8. (No new features in two versions?) It has all the same features, but they have put a fresh coat of “Macintosh” over the controls to make it seem pretty.
Sadly, it looks like they no longer include Animation Shop, and instead have their photo sharing / photo album program bundled with it. A shame. Animation shop is great.
These guys are fools. PSP has 85% of the functionality of Photoshop, which costs about $200 more. Instead of focusing on all of their great tools, they focus on “easy to use photo editing”, which makes it sound like “made for idiots and newbies”. They make the program sound lightweight, but keep the heavyweight $100 price tag.
Did I mention I can’t stand Corel?
This would work for me if I had a Mac computer