Forbidden No More
For the past weeks/days/month I have suffered from “Forbidden” error messages all throughout my domain initially in the subdomains of my hostees and then to various folders. It bothered me a whole lot and it was so frustrating searching for appropriate answers. Even my host couldn’t tell me directly but they did pointed out that it has to do with .htaccess files. Since I did messed with such files before, focusing on it would be the intelligent thing to do. With the old backup I have in my local drive I looked for differences in the said files with those that are currently residing in my (web) folders. It fatefully came to me that I did enabled HotLinking Protection (disabling direct linking, that is, enabling only select websites to access certain files externally) for all files instead of just images. So, basically, what happened was, when any of the sites/folders under my domain is accessed via a different webpage, an error is thrown because HTML and PHP files have been included in the blockage (I suppose), whereas when you input the URL in the address bar and hit enter, the page loads smoothly (though there are cases that a refresh of the page helps). This is another lesson learned and I think I really have to set up a small blog for such issues now. 😎
To Rashid, Sae, and Shan, my apologies for this very delayed fix. And to all those who thought that the site has already been buried six feet under, well, think again.
2 Comments
August 11, 2008 at 15:29
I can’t really understand why others want to use hotlink protection? I’ll understand it more if it’s a big site and they have bandwidth problems but for sites like personal domains? I think it’s unnecessary.
The way I see it, domain owners just want to use it because it’s kinda “cool” and that it’s because they know and saw other domain owners use/do it too.
I remember when I had my first ever domain, I want to use it too but decided not to.. I mean, who would hotlink my images other than myself? haha
Me, I don’t use my hosting for commercial purposes naman eh so it’s okay for me if someone hotlinks my images and other files. 😉
Anyway, I’m glad the problem’s now fix. :laugh:
August 11, 2008 at 20:26
I do partly see it cool. Yeah, maybe my images (or any file for that matter) will never ever be hotlink-ed. But then, since the feature’s there, why bother not to use it. And besides, I just learned a new lesson myself. :tongue: