Angelfire




Okay, first off I'm not bashing Angelfire. Aside from those banner ad thingers, I think they're a good webhosting company! But as I'm sure many of you know, they've started to implement a 'wonderful' little code that forbids non-Angelfire members from linking to images on any Angelfire site.

I'd first thought that I was safe from this. After all, about 99.9% of my graphics are all uploaded onto my own site. In fact, I think the only graphics that AREN'T uploaded on my site are banners. I didn't realize that some of the banners on my links pages were replaced by ugly "Angelfire" ads until I went in the other day to add a couple of links. Now, it won't be too difficult to go back to those sites, save their banners, and then upload them (which is really what I should have done in the first place), but just the fact that I have those ugly Angelfire things there right now bothers me!

The actual concept is a good one, though. For ages, people have been posting on their sites that their images are NOT to be directly linked. Doing so eats up bandwidth, which makes both their page AND yours run slower. I can't pretend to know the whole deal, because half of it confuses me, but there's only one point everyone really needs to know: direct-linking is bad. It should not be done. The only reason some of the banners on my links page aren't uploaded is because when I copied the HTML code given on the site to which I was linking, they just gave the URL to their banner instead of putting in something like "banner1.gif"....that pretty much tells the viewer, "Hey! Don't direct-link my stuff! Upload it onto your own server!"

Now I know most of you are wondering, "So what's the point?" Well, I'm kind of in indecision about Angelfire's new "Anti-Bandwidth-Stealing" codes. As I said, the concept is good. It prevents others from being able to steal bandwidth and thereby slow sites down. Besides that, bandwidth costs money, and I'm sure Angelfire wasn't willing to shell out more just so that more people could directly link images. But on the other hand, it's so ANNOYING! There are some things that I HAVE to upload onto Angelfire (like icons and things), because GeoCities doesn't support those file extensions. So unless GeoCities DOES start allowing file extensions like .ico, I'm kind of in a no-win situation!

So in short, the idea is a good one, Angelfire. But in a way, wouldn't it have been better if GeoCities had done it instead, since they don't allow as many file extensions to be uploaded? (If you didn't understand that, don't worry. It made sense to me. ^_~)
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