(no subject)

[arethinn]

I am just tearing my hair out over trying to host the pictures for my custom mood themes on my own website rather than in LJ ScrapBook, which is where they currently are. (I'm considering letting my paid account lapse, so ScrapBook would go with that. Technically you don't get custom mood themes with a basic account, but if you have one already in place, it's supposed to stick, although you can't make further changes to it.) If I turn off hotlinking protection, everything is hunky-dory, but I want that on. And I can't seem to enter anything in the allowed referers list that actually works and lets the images appear. It won't take input like .insanejournal.com; it apparently has to be a full URL beginning with http://, and besides that, http://www.insanejournal.com doesn't make it work anyway. I can only assume that the actual http request is coming from some other server name, but I can't figure out what. (I happened to be testing on IJ because I want it to work there too, but my recollection is of having similar problems on LJ the last time I tried this with hotlink protection. I assume the same will be the case on Dreamwidth.) edit 2: No, in fact, the case is that the referer changes to match the account name of the person reading their flist. (I could add my own journal name to the list but it would only work if someone viewed the journal directly.) With wildcard entries simply getting erased if I try to add them to the whitelist, I can't see how it's feasible to add all possible referers. Argh.

I really don't want to do something like start a Photobucket account just for this. There should be a way to make this work but I am just at my wits' end.

edit 1: Really, I suppose I could learn to live without the mood themes; most of the time I forget to set a mood on posts anyway. But I need a place to stick pictures when I just want to display them in my journal, which is the other main thing I use ScrapBook for. I suppose if it came to it I could stick them in my deviantArt scraps or flickr or something, but it doesn't seem like the "right" solution somehow.

Comments

[arethinn]

Did you copy the .htaccess file to the image directory, then add the new line(s) to what was already there?

That, yeah. Those images are never referenced on eristic.net so it's not like that permission needed to be there, but it doesn't hurt anything.

But I suspect the risk is low (and if someone tried it, you could always swap out the images for something that makes them look like horrible hotlinkers).

It'd break my own moodtheme too, though, so at that point all I could do is switch back to a public one. But yeah, I think the risk is low.

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

But you'd know you were making the switch, and so you could update your moodtheme to use the new URLs.

Sorry, I just realized I left out a step! Example:

Suppose you have some icon at eristic.net/ljstuff/icon.png, and someone starts hotlinking to it. You could move that thing to .../new-icon.jpg, and replace it with a nasty image, and update your moodtheme to reference the new one.

A lot of work, true.

[arethinn]

But you'd know you were making the switch, and so you could update your moodtheme to use the new URLs.

No, I couldn't, as I think I've said a couple times was the whole point of this exercise: to change them from ScrapBook urls to my website URLs before I couldn't anymore. Custom mood themes are a paid feature; if you have one in place when your account expires, it sticks (supposedly -- obviously I have never tested this before, but we'll find out on Wednesday), but you can't edit it. So I wouldn't be able to change the URLs for the pictures and if I changed the pictures themselves and broke it, my only option would be to revert to a public moodtheme (or live with broken, but that's silly).

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

Oops! Right, sorry about forgetting that. *headsmack*