I’ve heard various complaints from blog-owners that when their posts are Digged, their servers’ load increases for the worse. After a bit of study, I’ve found that most of this load is caused by the extreme amount of images that are loaded. The Digg Protector will determine if a visitor is from Digg, and if the visitor is indeed from Digg, the plugin will serve them a remotely-hosted version of the image. Otherwise, the plugin will serve the locally-hosted (on that server) image.
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Credits
Much credit is owed to Trevor Fitzgerald, who helped me climb the slippery slope of regular expressions, and brought me to my senses.
Download
The current version of the Digg Protector is 1.0. You can download the 1.0 version from several sources:
No previous versions are available for download at this time, because 1.0 is the first version.
Installation
The installation of Digg Protector is quite an easy process:
- Unzip the Digg Protector package you just downloaded.
- Upload digg-protector.php to your plugins folder—/wp-content/plugins/.
- Activate Digg Protector through the Plugins menu in the WordPress Dashboard.
Usage
Basic HTML knowledge is required to use this plugin; you’ll have to manually edit the source code of your posts.
To use the Digg Protector, add a “protect” attribute to any image tag in order to have it be protected (the URL given in the “protect” attribute will be used as the image if your visitor is from Digg).
Demonstration
You can watch the demonstration video below to get a feel for what Digg Protector does for you:
Planned Improvements
- It is planned to add the ability to check for other sites similar to Digg, such as Reddit and Delicious; or to let the sites to protect from be customizable.
In the News
- December 11, 2007:
Much thanks is owed to BloggingTips, who listed the Digg Protector as one of the top plugins of the week.
Feedback
If you have a bug to report, a feature to suggest, or any random comment about this plugin, please do so by using the comment form after the end of this post. Don’t worry; you don’t need to register to write a comment.
Why not make it automatic? If the user is coming via Digg, you could just automatically Coralize all images.
Great suggestion, @Viper. That will probably be implemented very soon.. CoralCDN looks like an interesting method that will no longer require HTML editing.