Dec. 4th, 2005|06:34 pm: A couple years ago, I think it was Kristine that sent me this article. I printed it out and saved it but I never shared it with anyone like I meant to. It talks about alternatives to spending hundreds or thousands of dollars every Christmas on everyone you know. Lots of great points are in it to rationalize being a big cheapskate. Which is what I’ve done for the past 2 or 3 years now. I only buy for my kids now, and then a little something for my parents and girlfriend. Screw everyone else. A $2.99 pack of generic Christmas cards is about the extent of my holiday shopping. It’s a good read. So go read it.

Remember my weird issues with those web sites who were mirroring my webcam page? Well I noticed today that it’s not even framing MY site within it’s site. They’ve just copied my useless webcam pages and hotlinked to my 3-year-old webcam images on my site. So they didn’t really send 50,000 extra users to my home page, they actually made 50,000 users access the images on my webcam page. But since the page refreshes, it was actually quite a bit lower than that.

I still don’t know WHY my outdated webcam page and nobody offered me any ideas in my last post about it. I thought maybe it had something to do with them needing fresh content for their new sites so that Google would crawl it and give them a good search engine ranking. But that’s a dumb theory because my webcam page is OLD and there’s nothing on there they couldn’t have written themselves. They took the time to steal the html and content from my page when they could have just as easily created original content themselves. They also took the time to add my URL in front of the images in the html code to ensure that the images would load from my site. And they changed all of the links on the site to their own various URLs for different things. So I dunno.

Anyway, instead of disallowing hotlinking on my site, I just changed the images that they’re stealing from me. Check out their URLs below! Caution - tub girl. Let’s see how long it all lasts.

mycam.freeownhost.com/
privcam.freeownhost.com/
owncam.freesuperhost.com/
myhome.freesuperhost.com/

Also, I fixed the guestbook on my page so nobody can add URLs to their guestbook entries anymore. That should eliminate most of the spam there. The spam was worse on there than on phonelosers.org. I just finished deleting it all.

Brad Carter - Battling Spam Since 1997!

EDIT: Here’s the numbers I just got from my log. It comes down to about 500 unique visiters a day hitting those pictures. But those 500 people are loading the images about 13,000 times. There are 3 images on the page so divide that by 3 and each person is reloading my cam page (the page refreshes automatically) about 26 times before leaving the page. So by this time tomorrow, approximately 500 people will be grossed out by the image of tub girl, all because of me! I rule!

Also, my theory of them trying to get higher up in the search engines is stupid. They’ve obviously got some major traffic going to their web sites, for them to be able to send 500 different people to me per day. Who knows how they’re driving all that traffic there. If they have that kind of an audience, why are they showing that audience my outdated webcam page??