I used to have free postcards available from this website. But when I enabled the hotlink protection, the javascripts no longer worked. And then I found that people were just taking the images and sending them to their friends, not using the card site at all. Just going in, finding a card and sucking my bandwidth, stealing the images and sending them along. That was the final straw. I ended the postcards. It just really pissed me off, since there were disclaimers on every page that these images were copyrighted and not for general use. People just didn’t care.
I spent a lot of time on that site when I first got it up. Had some fun javascripts and fun pictures. The winner of Dorissimo's Kitty of the Month contest had their picture up, available as a postcard. People could upload their own image and their own music to send to friends.
But as time went by, I lost interest in it. Found other things to do online. Found games that wasted way too much of my days. Found out how very easy it was to spend money online. (One of my most favoritest things in the whole wide world! *lol*)
Way back when I first started my website, even over at GeoCities, I used MyPostcards.com service. I paid by the year. The images and music and card codes were all on my website, but the cards actually moved through their website. And they did a pretty good job. They had advertising for the various postcard sites and were very, very friendly and helpful.
But it go to the point that I didn’t want to have to depend on anyone to do what I had on my website. I got this hair up my butt (where on earth did that saying come from?) that I didn’t want anything hosted remotely. I’d have my own guestbooks, thank you very much. I’d have my own forums, too. I figured I wanted control over them and I was real tired of the remotely hosted applications changing owners, changing rules, changing prices.
And so, I found a nice little postcard script, a friend (Melanie of Some Moore Cats) did some major script hacks for me and made the nice little postcard script even better. And everything was good, until I disabled hotlinking.
So, I get to thinking I might like to do the postcards again. And you know what? I’ve changed my feeling on remotely hosted. I’m going with MyPostcards.com again. I paid for a year. If I don’t like the way it works, I can always cancel. And maybe, if you, dear reader, like the postcards and use the postcards, you might add a little to the tipjar. To offset the cost of the cards.
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