Rice Blogger

An important task as a webmaster is to prevent your resources to be stolen or your website to be hacked. I had both of this experience now after finding one of my blog got 280gb of bandwidth used on the month of June 2009 and even at 2rd week of July it is already at 350+gb of bandwidth used. Fortunately and unfortunately, I did not even get any warning email and no service disconnection from my Hostgator Shared Hosting account.

This is the stats with around 1k users a day. You can confirm someone is stealing your bandwidth when you see a sudden of increase in bandwidth usage and also see that your image bandwidth is taking a whole chunk of your bandwidth (my case was 96% of the 400+ gb at the end of the month)

Immediatelly I use .htaccess to prevent image hotlinking by adding the code below into the .htaccess file:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?website\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|jpg)$ /no-hotlinking-image.jpe [L]

I know that there is draw back on this but this is the quickest and most popular method to solve this problem and as you see the bandwidth drop pretty quickly after 13 July. After that I have reduce the size of  my no-hotlinking-image.jpe to a bare minimal and also remember to include some advertisements on the image.

To find out who is stealing your image bandwidth you can check out the raw access logs. This is where I look for at cpanel admin. Download the logs and if you see some image being load on other url other than yours, visit them and you should see your image (no-hotlinking-image.jpe) display on their page.

Recently I bought myself a Nikon D90 Kit, and this is my new hobby when I am not in front of my computer. To publish my amateur photography, I have decided to use my change my personal blog into a Photoblog. I have did some research for free Wordpress Theme for Photographer and found this five great theme.

Grace Photoblog Theme (Demo : Download)

This is a simple designed photographer theme that have a 900px rotating picture in front. Very nice size and method to present your photos.

Monotone (Demo : Download)

This theme changes width accordingly to your picture width and it also changes the background color to give a different look for each visitors.

Fullscreen (Demo : Download)

This is simply cool. Mouse over the picture and you will get what I mean. It is not Free yet, but they claimed that it will be given away free soon, so signup and wait.

Reflection (Demo : Download)

Create a reflection on all your photos with the help of YABP photoblog software.

Photo Blog Wordpress Theme (Demo : Download)

It gives you picture a great deal of focus, mouse over the picture and you see the description. Also click on the blog info to get the archive, blogroll, pages and category.

Bonus: Zack 990 (Demo : Download) – Found it last minute

This gives your pictures collection a very organize way to browse. Few method of displaying pictures as you can see from the screenshot below.

If you are a photographer and would like some wordpress theme that would enhance your picture layout, this is definitely for you. This theme are also suitable for videographer blog. The best thing is that they are free.

If you are wondering how other twitter users direct message you when you follow them, it is because there is an automated method to do this. I found this website TweetLater, which is great in managing new followers. I would say that it is a must have for all twitter users.

Their features include:-

• Direct Message New Follower
• Posting Future Tweets
• Vet New Followers – control if you should follow back base on updates/followers/twit image
• Or you can do Auto Follow features
• Manage multiple twitter accounts
• Keyword Alert via Email
• Also some nifty paid service – but the free version is already superb

I have used it for a few months now and I am pretty satisfied with the controls I get on my twitter. This is the best Twitter Application so far compare to those I compiled some a year ago on Twitter Application.

Website: Tweet Later

Also, remember to follow @8dee

I know this is a little back track but I notice that there are actually quite a lot of blogs that are pretty good in terms of alexa ranking, pagerank and also commentators but do not have technorati ranking. So I would like to educate others to do this as you may actually deserves to be in the Malaysia Top 100 Bloggers list.

Here is the steps:-

1. Click on “Claim your blog” button like the screen shot below

2. Then enter your url

3. The only tricky part is to get the code, you can actually copy the code and make a blog post under HTML view, or you could add a link.

For wordpress the name would be “Technorati Profile” and the Web Address fields would be something like “”http://technorati.com/claim/[code here]"

As I only have 2 different counters to make my list, I cannot just simply not take technorati into account. Until I get my pagerank script to work, we will have to bear with this at the moment. Moreover, I think technorati is a good ranking to judge a blog ranking.

p/s: also you could claim your twitter account by twitting the link. But don't feel that there is much use to that.

This is the very first time for this blog to publicize feedburner count because it has been low previously. As I have reach the 100 reader mark, I have decided to publicize it. Not sure if it will increase my rss feed subscriber but I decided to give it a try.

There is a lot of bloggers talking about publicizing feedburner count too early because you will give a negative impression towards your blog. But on the other hand, you will have another icon on your website asking others to subscribe to your feeds.

Also, if you decided to keep your feed count a secret, remember to inactivate it because people will still be able to view your feed count with this reveal feedburner count trick.

If you would like to publicize your feedburner count, here is what you need to do.