XD; if you don't know enough to insert an image on your site or your Lj posts, then no, it's certainly not you.
Direct linking, or hotlinking, or leeching bandwidth, is. uh. *thinks*
If I upload a pic to my own site, and display it on my site, i'm not hotlinking it. But if someone else puts a tag in their entry that makes it so the pic I hosted on my site appears on their site, it's hotlinking -- basically it tells the computer that they should get the picture not from the site they're viewing but from mine. So this means that it's my bandwidth (the size of downloads and information transfers i'm allowed per month) that gets eaten every time someone visits their site and downloads the picture on their computer.
(of course uploading a copy of the pic on their own server fixes the hotlinking problem, but not the possible plagiarism problem.)
There are sites like photobucket that are made for hotlinking stuff -- like when you're on a forum or LJ, they only host the icons (and sometimes not even that much) so this means every other pic has to come from an outside site, and in these cases it's very practical. But photobucket is free, so they put a limit on them. And usually I never reach 60% percent of my bandwidth at the end of the month, but this month i'm already at 96% and there's still nine days to the end of the month and the reset of the bandwidth limits. So i'm a bit bummed. x_x
if this doesn't make sense i can explain more, but that's the extend of my knowledge, i'm afraid. x_x
no subject
Direct linking, or hotlinking, or leeching bandwidth, is. uh. *thinks*
If I upload a pic to my own site, and display it on my site, i'm not hotlinking it. But if someone else puts a tag in their entry that makes it so the pic I hosted on my site appears on their site, it's hotlinking -- basically it tells the computer that they should get the picture not from the site they're viewing but from mine. So this means that it's my bandwidth (the size of downloads and information transfers i'm allowed per month) that gets eaten every time someone visits their site and downloads the picture on their computer.
(of course uploading a copy of the pic on their own server fixes the hotlinking problem, but not the possible plagiarism problem.)There are sites like photobucket that are made for hotlinking stuff -- like when you're on a forum or LJ, they only host the icons (and sometimes not even that much) so this means every other pic has to come from an outside site, and in these cases it's very practical. But photobucket is free, so they put a limit on them. And usually I never reach 60% percent of my bandwidth at the end of the month, but this month i'm already at 96% and there's still nine days to the end of the month and the reset of the bandwidth limits. So i'm a bit bummed. x_x
if this doesn't make sense i can explain more, but that's the extend of my knowledge, i'm afraid. x_x