mgroves

In case you haven’t noticed, all of the full-size images on mgroves.com are now sporting a small watermark in the lower right-hand corner.

The reason I’ve done this is because I’ve noticed a growing amount of people hotlinking my image to use on their blog or on a forum (like Fark for instance). Since this hasn’t really drained my bandwidth considerably, I’m not too concerned about it. However, it is my bandwidth and I’m paying for it, so I would like to get some benefit from the exchange if possible. Hopefully with a small watermark, I’ll get at least some sort of boost in traffic and recognition.

However, this is NOT a license to hotlink to any image on mgroves.com you want. I still do not want you to hotlink.

If you haven’t seen the watermark yet, click on the images below under “Attachments”.

On the programming side, the way I’ve done the watermarks is somewhat interesting. For each image that gets uploaded, a component of the back-end will create a thumbnail version that’s 100px wide (with aspect ratio height), a “hangnail” version, that’s 64px wide (for misc back-end use) and a full-sized watermark version, which contains “MGROVES.COM” in the lower right-hand corner. I’m also able to toggle the watermark on and off at will. How I do that…is a secret for now.

This whole exercise was an interesting lesson in combining ASP and PHP together. I wanted to use Persits’s AspJpeg component, since it handles GIF files and comes with my hosting package. However, I’ve already written the entire backend in PHP and I didn’t want to change that for the sake of GIF files. The solution involved a seperate ASP file to handle the resizing and rewriting, and the two languages communicated through the common medium of GET/Querystring.

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