NEWSLETTER
Earlier this week I wrote and posted a video on how to make memory games with flippidad. Almost every time I write about Flippity I get an email from someone who has had a problem with images not displaying. This week was no exception to that pattern.
In general, there are two reasons why an image link doesn’t render an image in a Flippity template. The first reason is that the link itself is incorrect. The link (URL) has to end in .png or .jpg or .jpeg to work correctly. You can usually find the correct URL simply by right-clicking on the image and selecting “copy image address”.
In a nutshell, hot linking is inserting an image into a blog post via a URL instead of uploading the image file itself to your blog. You can read more about hotlinking on plain English Wikipedia or in Gator Page Host about preventing hotlinking to your own work.
Why you and your students should avoid hotlinking.
Hotlinking itself isn’t bad if you’re only linking to images that you own and control online. For example, let’s say you have a Flickr account to which you upload dozens of photos you’ve taken. You can use the embed code or link that Flickr provides to post your images to your blog post.
Where hotlinking causes problems is when you link to someone else’s image hosted on your account or on their servers. Even if the image is in the public domain, you probably don’t want to link to it. In fact, some services, such as pixabay which hosts public domain images, blocks hotlinking attempts. They block hotlinks because when you link to them you are using more of their bandwidth than if you were to simply download the image to your computer and then upload it to your blog.
The biggest concern about hotlinking is not knowing exactly who or what you are linking to. As Sue hinted in her Tweet this morning, it is possible that the image she linked to and the image displayed could be changed without notice. It’s also possible that the link a student inserts into the direct link will take them back to the malware-laden site or host that could then wreak havoc on her blog.
