It’s Sausages All the Way Down
It’s Sausages All the Way Down
2 min readI work for a biotechnology company in very northern Norway looking after all of their graphic design and web development needs. It’s a fulfilling job as I do not have a scientific background and am constantly challenged to find new and interesting ways to interpret the data that is produced by our scientists.
One of my techniques is to produce simple workflows of rather complex and confusing scientific protocols. These workflows are usual only 3 steps and get right to the crux of the protocol, they’re rather nice and quite simple. So nice in fact that I have noticed other competing companies directly embedding and linking to these images.
Initially I was pissed off. There is a lot of hours put into these rather simple looking workflows. Lots of consulting with the scientists to make sure I understood their protocol correctly, that everything makes sense and there are no conflicting messages present through out the workflow. I went for a walk to cool off and it dawned on me… these bastards are hot-linking to our images, I can have some fun and mess with them!
# Prevent image hot-linking #
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|bmp)$ http://i.imgur.com/WP7x9BX.jpg [NC,R,L]
What the above 4 lines of code do is check the HTTP_REFERER of the image request and if it’s not (www.)domain.com we send the webpage an image of sausages instead. Specifically these rather delicious looking lamb sausages.
What resulted next was hilarious and had the desired effect. The offending website was now displaying these sausages throughout all of their product pages that once had my beautiful workflow images.
Over the course of the next two weeks I monitored the offending website, fully expecting them to update all of their image links within the first 24 hours of this happening. It took them 14 days… that’s 10 whole business days. That’s potential customers coming to your website and seeing sausages instead of pretty images of workflows and enzymes. Talk about having egg on your face! Still, result achieved.
One unintentional side effect of what I have now coined the “sausage script”, is a lot of our distributors have also been hot-linking to our images. When this script went live it left a lot of them scrambling as to what was going on, why were all of their product pages polluted with these delicious, mouth watering sausages.
Some have fixed their erroneous ways while some have not. I think we might add a “sausage script” clause into our distributor agreements.
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