Protect Your Images and Bandwidth with .htaccess

Protecting Your Bandwidth from Being Stolen!

.htaccess files are lovely, lovely things. They do exactly what the name implies: control access to your files. About six months ago, I had problems with a bunch of l33t brats 'borrowing' my bandwidth and using a few of my photos on message boards.

So I decided to take their toy away.

A lovely thing about .htaccess files: if you place them in a directory, the conditions and permissions you set up affect all subfolders of that folder. So, if you want to protect all your images, just drop a single .htaccess file in your main images directory, and all subfolders are taken care of.

Here's the code that I'm using for my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://YOURSITE.COM/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://WWW.YOURSITE.COM/.*$ [NC]
ReWriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|swf|xml|flv)$ – [N,F,L]

It's a good idea to do both yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com. Also, if you know of any other sites that you want to allow to use your images, be sure to add in a line for them in this file.

If the http_referer doesn't match one of the strings you've provided in those lines, the image request will result in a 403 error.

To use this code on your site…

Make sure you can see hidden files (files beginning with a .) with your FTP client. (It's really hard to edit or delete files you can't see.) Paste these lines into a blank text document, save it as .htaccess, and upload it to your images directory.

That should be all!

Using Facebook Traffic to Drive Brand Loyalty

The Big Brands Do it. Why Can't You?

WebProNews recently covered a study from Chitika, which found that Facebook was the most valuable social media tool for driving repeat readers to content sites. The study was based on 33 million unique users across Chitika's publisher network in September. It compared the number of visitors coming from major traffic sources Digg, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter, to the number of times those visitors came back to the referred site. Visitors that went to a site four or more times in one week were considered loyal users. By a wide margin, Facebook led the pack in providing loyal traffic. 20% of all visitors from Facebook visited the site four or more times per week.

"We've received the most clients from Facebook than any other social media website," a reader commented on the article. "Although we've received slightly more visitors from Digg and Stumbleupon, the viewers have not converted into customers the same way they had through Facebook."



There has certainly been plenty of talk about how Facebook can drive traffic, but clearly there are still a lot of people struggling with just how to go about doing so.

"Why am I not getting this?" another reader asked. "Blogs I've done are boosting my Google, Yahoo, and Bing ratings and getting traffic to my web site, but I'm not getting how Facebok can do this."

Comments like these are not uncommon, and to be fair, this one was made prior to Microsoft's announcement of a deal with Facebook (Google has been rumored to be in talks with Facebook as well).

But not all traffic has to come from search, although Facebook exposure can certainly contribute to that as well, if nothing else, than simply through promotion leading to links.

When a Facebook user frequently checks for status updates, he/she is likely to see new posts made from Facebook Pages he/she is subscribed to. This means creating a Facebook page can have a great effect on page owners. Making readers aware of the page is key as well. Luckily Facebook has a widget called the Fan box, that you can put on your site, which can lead new visitors directly to your Facebook page.

Facebook has also just updated another important widget - the share button. Now it will provide a live count of shares, as well as analytical information. You can find out how people are sharing and engaging with your content, and gain further insight into how your stuff is doing with the Facebook community (and adjust your strategy accordingly).

Traffic is a common goal, but it is not the only one. Going back to the topic at the beginning of this article, brand loyalty is a big one.

A representative for Stuzo Group, one of Facebook's exclusive development partners, shared some interesting case studies with us, looking at how they created branded applications and fan pages for brands like Doritos, Budweiser, Smashbox, and Purina.

"When Stuzo works with these brands, the goals that they have most often in creating these promotions is to increase brand loyalty and recognition, boost traffic to their website, and drive sales," the representative said. "These goals all go hand in hand, and explain why Chitika's study was so valuable; hits to a website are great, but they don't mean much unless they contribute to brand loyalty and positive recognition of the brand." (emphasis added)

A common theme among the case studies provided by Stuzo is that they all present clear objectives for what they want to accomplish with Facebook. For example, Budweiser's were:

1. Create brand awareness through a strong fan base and social channel opt-ins

2. Incentivize users to engage with the brand on a regular basis

3. Convert new customers and drive increase in sales



Budweiser went the route of contests and competitions (which are viral by nature). According to the case study, this has resulted in:

- Hundreds of thousands of Unique Pageviews

- Sustained high level of brand engagement by all measurements

- Significant, continued growth in Budweiser’s Social CRM and social channel opt-ins

Budweiser is just one example of a big brand finding success through social media, and through the use of Facebook in particular. As I recently discussed, you can find new and interesting ways to integrate social media into your own plans by looking at some of the brands you use yourself and how they employ different tools. This helps you to put yourself in the customer's shoes and determine the things that work and the things that don't.

What You Can Learn from Amazon to Increase Holiday Sales

By Chris Crum - Wed, 10/28/2009 - 1:11pm.

Don' Lose Out to the Competition

There is a reason Amazon is widely known as one of the biggest retailers online (if not the biggest). The company knows what it's doing.

Amazon has appeared in headlines recently for a number of reasons, and a fair amount of them are related to different things the company has been doing to increase its sales as the holiday season approaches. While as a small business, you don't likely have the clout that Amazon does, they do employ strategies that you can learn from in order to potentially increase your own sales.

1. Mobile Payments

Earlier this month Amazon launched its own mobile payments service. I don't expect you to launch your own, but it may be in the best interest of your online store to at least offer some kind of mobile payment option. People are using their phones more and more these days to shop online. You should be accommodating that.

2. Same Day Delivery

Also this month, Amazon revealed a new shipping option for some of its products to some markets called "Local Express Deliver." What this is, is essentially same-day delivery. A customer orders the product and they get it to them on the same day. This will be an attractive feature for procrastinators.

This will not always be feasible, but for local businesses, it may be more so. Whether or not you can offer same-day, you should offer as many options as possible. And if you can do same-day, I don't see why you couldn't charge more for it. Amazon certainly does.

3. Focused Landing Page

Amazon has put out a "Holiday Toy List". This is a list of the top toys and games that the company expects to sell during the holiday season. They have a dedicated page for these items that they are promoting. This makes it easy for customers to find the things they are likely to be looking for.


Why couldn't you do the same thing? Look at the products you offer that people are most likely to be interested in for the holiday season, and draw their attention to them with a focused landing page. Then promote that page accordingly.

4. Ultra-Competitive Pricing

Amazon and Walmart have been engaged in a price war over bargain books. Walmart started by offering pre-orders of highly anticipated books at a very low price, and Amazon immediately started offering the same deal. Walmart then lowered its price, then Amazon did the same.


Don't forget to do some research to find what your competitors are charging for products that are the same or similar to what you are selling. You may not be able to take it to the level of Walmart and Amazon, but you should at least be aware of what competitors are charging. If it's less, there's a good chance the business will go to them.

How to uninstall VMWare Fusion from a Apple Mac computer

I had been trialing VMWare Fusion on the Mac, and although it was working fine, I thought I would reinstall it because my Windows XP had viruses I could not remove. I backed up everythign to my Mac drive and removed the VM Windows XP Profile and dumped the Mac trash. (5GB)

I wanted to remove all traces of VMWare Fusion as I like to keep all of my computers as uncluttered as possible, and here is the best way of doing it.

1 Power off all running virtual machines, and quit VMware Fusion.
2 In the Finder, open the folder Macintosh HD/Library/Application
Support/VMware Fusion, and double-click Uninstall Vmware Fusion.
3 When you are prompted to confirm, click Uninstall.
4 Enter your administrative password to begin the uninstallation.
When the uninstallation is complete, a confirmation message is displayed.