Please check .htaccess code [bandwidth protection]

Need to protect bandwith, yet allow Google Images; not sure code is correct

[hfguide]

Hello, everyone. I am going through a nightmare regarding hotlink protection, so am really toying with this whole .htaccess thing for the first time.

I have a site where I offer free images. I want to protect the images from being hotlinked; however, I'd like the images to be viewed from Google Images, even when the image's URL is called. I'd also like any hotlinked images to be replaced with a gif that posts a message [akin to "don't hotlink"].

I've been going through various .htaccess tutorial sites, but they all seem to code differently. I was able to pull together the following code but am unsure if this will do the trick. I also don't want to screw things up, because the last time I toyed with .htaccess I really messed things up. Does this look alright?

[Oh-- and if anyone's wondering, for the purpose of this post I've put *mydomain.com* in there on purpose]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://(www\.)?google.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif¦jpg)$ http://www.mydomain.com/message.gif [R,L]

Also, how do I make sure that http://www.mydomain.com and http://mydomain.com are both listed as *friendly* referrers?

Thanks in advance!

[edited by: jdMorgan at 1:16 am (utc) on Feb. 9, 2006]
[edit reason] De-linked, formatting. [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

The code is basically OK, but we really don't do code reviews. If you have any problems with it after testing, I'm sure it can be improved.

The (www\.)? sub-pattern means that your RewriteConds will match a hostname with or without a "www." prefix.

For more information, see the documents cited in our forum charter [webmasterworld.com] and the tutorials in the Apache forum section of the WebmasterWorld library [webmasterworld.com].

Jim

[hfguide]

Thanks.