The Conception and Birth of HotlinkALARM
I have a story to tell.
The story starts at 8:08 GMT on Thursday, November 8, 2007.
Some days earlier, I became a member of The Internet Marketing Circle.
A thread at the TIMIC forum was about someone who was
selling a stolen product on eBay, a product TIMIC members
themselves had created as a group project, and the thief was
even hotlinking to the images on the real product site.
At the exact time mentioned above, I clicked the button to
submit my contribution to the ongoing conversation. The post
named some things that might be done to prevent such from
happening in the future.
It was a serendipitous post.
That very same day, using the forum's private messaging
system, Patrick Pretty and I started talking about the
feasibility of making software to do some of the things I
had mentioned in the post, along with a few additional
features we thought of. Just to make a short list:
-
Substitute the hotlinked image on the thief's web page
with a custom image.
-
Link the substitute image back to the real product site.
-
Make an alert box come up on the thief's web page with
a custom message.
-
Insert custom text straight into the thief's web page.
-
Automatically redirect the browser away from the
thief's web page, to the real product site.
I thought all those features would be feasible. So I did
some testing and reported that, yes, I could make the
software.
Patrick wanted to bring Willie Crawford on board, if he
thought the project worthwhile.
Willie said, "Yes." And a joint venture was born.
We called the software HotlinkALARM.
One of the reasons I wanted to do this project was as a
surprise birthday present for Mari.
The project turned into a larger scope than I had
anticipated.
At first, it was exclusively to protect images. It ended up
also protecting pretty much any other type of file that can
be linked to.
We decided on two levels of protection.
Each level would send the site owner an email whenever it
detected unauthorized linking, to alert the site owner
immediately. If they're hotlinking to product images or
other product-related links, they might also be selling the
same products without permission.
The Standard Alarm level would be for basic site-wide
protection of all images and other files of certain types.
The Power Alarm level would be protection for individual
images (or other links) that the site owner deemed most
important. This would be the feature-rich one, the one where
the site owner could insert messages into the thief's web
page, or spawn an alert box, or redirect the browser, or
other maneuvers.
And it all worked out.
The software was built. It was beta tested. And it is ready
for sale at http://hotlinkalarm.com/
Happy birthday, Mari.
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Will Bontrager
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