PhotoDude.com

odd... any idea why all your images appear broken to me? i've actually noticed the same on noah's site - all other sites work fine (something with my browser and includes?) running ie6 (all default settings) on xp...

Noah and I both use our .htaccess files to limit image theft via denying referrers outside our domain. Basically, if some page that does not contain "photodude.com" within its URL is the "referral" for the request to the server, the server won't send the image. That way, when some guy at joeblow.com decides to use one of my images, and simply links it off my server rather than downloading the image to theirs, the server sees a request from www.joeblow.com/isuck.htm, and blocks the request resulting in a broken image. However, I've also noticed that in some situations where the connection provider is using some type of cache, or some type of proxy or firewall that alters the referring URL, it will cause broken images. I see this as an error in my logs, and it usually runs less than 1% of requests, with an odd day it will peak at 2%. So it's clearly an uncommon situation, and one I don't fully understand. But after getting ripped repeatedly for bandwidth (not just the image), I had to implement this solution. I'll check my logs around the time you hit this page and see if I can find any clues.