Website fun, and Rickrolling hotlinkers

Replaced the backend of petterhaggholm.net with my new, mod_wsgi-based backend. It’s really ludicrously heavy-weight for serving up static pages, but my traffic is low, and I have (as of an hour or two ago) endowed it with cache expiry settings preventing reload on every hit, so it shouldn’t be too bad. On the bright side, it’s more flexible, and it will allow me to serve up more sophisticated webapps, like my private über-nerdy RPG project.

User visible changes are few and far between, apart from some CSS3 glitz. The site will probably look slightly worse on older browsers, slightly better on nice, shiny, up-to-date ones like Firefox 3.5, Opera 10, and recent versions of Safari. (IE8? No idea.)

As I migrated over to this new framework, I also migrated over much of my old Apache config. One of the things this httpd.conf did was stop hotlinking of one of my images (this one), which some random schmuck on MySpace was using in his profile—hotlinked and uncredited. Previously, I just blocked it completely with a [F] (forbidden) rewrite rule based on Referer. (This isn’t bullet-proof, of course, but I just wanted to stop the bulk of the traffic; sometimes it was a substantial fraction of my total bandwidth usage.) Today, I decided not to refuse to serve the image; instead, I rewrote the request to a Rickroll:

Our intrepid hotlinking MySpace musician now shows a dancing Rick Astley under “Influences”; I save some bandwidth and gain some amusement. Sarah tells me that I am eccentric.