So for no reason other than ‘I can’ I decided to chuck a few ‘Trance in Motion‘ sets onto my server. Soon after I realised how dangerous that could be for my bandwidth so I set off to look for a hot-link protection solution.

I searched the web for hours and I just couldn’t find the right keywords to get it (honestly I tried everything).

After much failed attempts, I finally found a useful PHP script that allowed me to send files not normally accessible by the public and also doesnt require much to set up.

Zubrag’s Download Script.

http://www.zubrag.com/scripts/download.php

The only thing I really needed to change was the directory where the files are stored and also I had to add the MIME information for .rar files (incidently its application/x-rar if you were interested) because for some reason he limited the file types to a select few. Now I think about it, that’s actually a good idea since there could be, for example; a .htaccess file.

I should also note that despite there being multiple ways of getting apache to process PHP inside HTML, I never got it to work properly. So I ended up changing all of my site over to .php files.

I thought the W3 validation might fail after I did that, but it seems to be perfectly fine with it.

Anyway, now all my downloads are processed by http://downloads.derrynjones.com/download.php.

Now unfortunately this doesnt stop direct downloads, but it’s a step in the right direction. I think.

Actually, it also has the ability to restrict downloads to a specific address. So you can have it only allow downloads from downloads.derrynjones.com for example. Cool stuff.

Derryn,