murdomedia.net

I used to have a website,, which I designed in 1997. With the white text on black background, neon-effect buttons and spinning animated GIFs, it truly was a site of the nineties and that is where it should stay. I decommissioned the site last week, but arranged for it to record which URLs which were requested. As expected for an essentially dead site, other than robots, there were practically no hits, with the exception of one set of files.

In 2001, I made a desktop background, called Eye of the Code, which I submitted to themes.org. It has been reasonably popular, and someone even based a Fluxbox theme on it. What I didn't know was that 9 blogs and homepages were hotlinking to this image, so I was getting several hits per hour, downloading the 500kB image.

Now, tradition dictates replacing it with a suitable shock images, which due to captain_aj's valiant efforts I am very familiar with. However, I thought something more creative was called for.

On reading these pages, the impression I get from all of them is people screaming for attention. My desktop background was designed to be sedate and non-distracting (although it doesn't go well with text). I thus went for something more appropriate, of course including a photo of the centre of attention.

For example with Tabatha's MySpace page:



Using mod_rewrite I serve up the appropriate image based on the HTTP referrer. For example, here is the result for Yuppie Killer:

Before



After



In the interest of international relations, for the German page, I used "Guck mal ... ich bin TOLL!!", which translates to "Look ... I'm GREAT!!".

The full list of sites is below. If the background doesn't load correctly, hit Shift+Reload; browsers don't expect images to change on the basis of referrer, so often cache the wrong one.

Tabatha aka devilsangel891 – Website that plays music; stabby, stab

avril13<>s knuddelige HP – In German, big page, she likes Avril Lavigne and eyes apparently

Marie aka freak_taleen – "I felt like drawing a sheep." But you didn't; why not just hotlink to someone else's sheep?

Yuppie Killer aka fuckyourcar – Angry. Latest blog entry: "Am I missing something?...do I have a sign on me that says: "I'm a complete fucking moron?". No, but your new web page background should send a similar message

M.I.L.F. – How can someone be a self described MILF? (NSFW)

h_e_x_o_n – He has a <marquee> that displays an insult; classy

that displays an insult; classy Jocelyn aka strangeoid – " I am a very artsy-fartsy type person. I draw, write, paint, sing, act, sew, make my own jewlery". For a writer your spelling leaves something to be desired, and if you think blue text on a red background is aesthetically pleasing, I have doubts about the painting.

clompy – Wow, it makes my mouse pointer turn into a crosshair, how can I do that? (no photo unfortunately)

youlaugh_ibleed &ndash I think her keyboard is broken (again, no photo). And her page turns the cursor into a crosshair; I wonder if these two know each other?

I hope you will agree that this is a significant improvement. I will wait and see if the web page owners concur.

Update 6 Dec 2005:

Yuppie Killer is the first one to spot the change. As predicted by captain_aj, Yuppie Killer says:

To whoever hacked my account and changed my background picture....You are a fucking piece of shit

He has changed his user page to be white text on a white background, but if you highlight it then you can read his ranting.

Update 7 Dec 2005:

Yuppie Killer has updated his message:

To whoever hacked my account and changed my background picture, is that all you got?....You fucking piece of shit

Myself andare working on the answer.

Update 7 Dec 2005:

Tabatha has updated her page (still has music). She now hotlinks to a painting called "Mushroom People". She hasn't made any comments about the change, and doesn't have a blog.

Update 8 Dec 2005:

Avril 13 has changed her background. This time not hotlinking &ndash perhaps she is learning.

Clompy has taken her journal offline. Perhaps she thinks it has been hacked and will bring it back later.

Update 10 Dec 2005:

h_e_x_o_n has noticed. In his blog post, he says:

who made the new background for me :P i really like that......

It is still set to my image. Any suggestions on what I should do?

Update 11 Dec 2005:

A fine suggestion from captain_aj was to make h_e_x_o_n's background a screamer, albeit without the scream. You need to wait for 8 seconds.

Update 12 Dec 2005:

h_e_x_o_n doesn't like the screamer as much as the previous image. He now hotlinks to a 1275×1753 JPEG from Barb's Bunker. Tasteful, but makes the text unreadable. Probably for the best.

Update 15 Dec 2005:

h_e_x_o_n has found my journal, thanks to his (anti-)stalking script, and retaliated.