In today’s Report:

ALA 185

Preventing image/bandwidth theft.

Five things I know about me

Collect them all!

ALA 185

In Issue 185 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites, Thomas Scott offers “Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention:”

Most web professionals are all too aware of the problems caused by hotlinkers. Leechers. Bandwidth thieves. People who use images hosted on your web server on their own pages. With PHP and mod_rewrite, you can prevent embedding and allow linking while automatically creating gallery pages for those direct linkers.

Five things I know about me

1. Your baby daughter is due in September.
2. You’ve begun formulating an integrated theory of web design that might, when fleshed out, help you (and perhaps others) do better work.
3. The design, planning, and project management work you’re doing on behalf of your clients leaves you little time to update your personal site. Soon, you trust, the dam will break, and you will be free to post more frequently. (Still, while no one was looking, you made your Externals page more useful.)
4. The aforementioned workload also prevents you from responding to most of the email you receive from people who frequent your sites and read your books. You appreciate those email messages and regret your inability to respond to most of them at this time.
5. You live in New York City, a small island off the coast of America. Last night, walking your dog in the rain, you watched two dozen police cars race past, lights blazing, sirens blaring. It looked like Big Trouble, but there was nothing about it in this morning’s paper. Like all people everywhere, in every time, you wonder what kind of world your daughter will inhabit.

Previously in The Daily Report...

Faces We Love: Heine’s Tribute

This family of eight fonts, legible at even the smallest sizes, is perfect for designs requiring an aged or antique feeling.

The Contender

Last tango.

Architectural Digest vs. This Old House

How vs. why in web design. (ALA No. 184 and drop-down menus.) When web designers discuss their craft, they almost always focus on how to do a thing, rather than what things should or should not be done. As an industry, we are more like “This Old House” than Architectural Digest.

Production for Use

To understand and evaluate any design, you must consider the use context for which it was created. A case study and lessons therein. The beginnings of a broader approach to understanding web and interface design (including the relative importance of web standards).

Clarendon is the new Helvetica

The quirky slab serif has been quietly undergoing a renaissance similar to that enjoyed by Helvetica in the 1990s.

The Andy Kaufman Effect

On the web, nobody knows you’re not the dog you pretend to be.

Hot socks from Reboot

Three favorites from the May 1st Reboot. These sites might stimulate your creativity.

Blog This

Now anyone, at virtually any experience level, can own and manage an attractive and standards-compliant personal site. With input from Adaptive Path and Stopdesign, Blogger reinvents itself (and we lend a hand).