I noted in the referrer logs that the average daily number of hits for this site has nearly doubled in the past two months. I originally noticed a small increase back in October and attributed it to the fact that the Johnny Damon cake ranks fairly high in the Google Image search for “Johnny Damon.” (I also have a picture of Kirby Puckett and me that’s on the first page of images for “Kirby Puckett,” but less people are searching for Kirby these days.)
However, this most recent jump in traffic seems to come from http://www.backstreets.com/btx/viewtopic.php, which initially struck me as odd because it appears to be a message board for Bruce Springsteen fans, and I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about Bruce Springsteen, even in passing. So I poked around the site and discovered that user “Ando” was hotlinking to the thumbnail of the Damon cake as the signature to all his messages.
Now, I’d have to ask Rodin what the bandwidth limits are for chronosilence, but I doubt that he’s really endangering my ability to stay under those limits (especially since the site survived all the hits from the Time Traveler Convention). But it does annoy me that he’s linking to the picture without any reference to the site where it came from, especially since that’s a picture Laura took of a cake she made from scratch. And so I did something about it — enter the Revenge of the Fishgina, another of Laura’s photos from that same birthday party. Now every single one of this guy’s posts contains a picture of the fishgina, in its full 2272 x 1704 pixel glory.
Update: He changed his signature, which seems to have automatically updated all of his posts. That’s anti-climactic — I was sort of hoping for a reaction.