What is Hotlinking?

Hotlinking (also known as inline linking, piggybacking, leeching and bandwidth theft) refers to when one site links directly to an object on a second site. Typically, the object is a picture that can then be displayed on the linking site without the owner having to copy the actual file from the second site.

How Hotlinking can Affect your Wordpress Blog

Hotlinking not only allows another site to use your content without permission but also uses your bandwidth to do it. Every time a user surfs to the page of the offending site, the actual image shown is downloaded from your server to the user’s browser, even though the user is not on one of your web pages. This can degrade performance on your site or even cause your site to run over the bandwidth limit allotted by your web host - typically resulting in additional charges or even a suspension of service.
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When performing data analysis on a cohort population, it is often desirable to categorize characteristics can have many values. Age, income level and credit card score are examples of population attributes that can be placed into “buckets” and easily analyzed based on broad categories (without having resort to linear or logistic regression). While variables can be quickly encoded using IF statements, SAS’s Format procedure provides a more elegant and portable solution.
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Imagine you are given a list of major Canadian political donators and wish to load it into SAS for further analysis. The list is in a text file with fields delimited by tab characters. SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) offers wizards to automatically import a variety of file formats, but using these GUI’s preempts the chance for automation or additional processing during import. Using code to load data offers several advantages:

• Ability to redirect data to multiple data sets
• Ability to clean and modify data during load time
• Ability to delete unwanted data
• Portability and reusability

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What is Digg?

Generally referred to as a social news site, Digg is technically a user-driven news aggregator. Registered Digg users can “digg” (i.e. bookmark and submit) an article on a web page by submitting a URL, along with a brief description. URL submissions are placed on display for other Digg users (registered or not) to read, comment on, rate, and bookmark for themselves.

How Digg can benefit your blog

Two words: heavy traffic. A popular Digg article can easily send thousands of new visitors to a website in a single day. A website does not need an explicit link to Digg in order to receive the benefits of Digg exposure; however, adding a link at the end of every post will give regular and special interest visitors the opportunity to promote an article to a large news-oriented audience. The larger form of the Digg button also specifies the number of times an article has been bookmarked, which can be used as an indicator of its popularity among targeted visitors.

How to add a Digg button to Wordpress Posts

Digg support can be added directly to a Wordpress blog via editing the PHP code for certain files within the blog’s theme. The main challenge is finding the correct files to edit, since Wordpress themes can have different file structures. As such, this tutorial will be more of a strategy for altering a theme to add Digg support. To address most of the common issues users will encounter, a more complicated theme will be altered.

Prerequisites:

• A Wordpress installation with the ability to edit theme files (generally speaking, online services that do not allow you to upload your own themes also won’t let you edit existing theme files)
• An account with administrator privileges (required for editing theme files)

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