hotlinking / htaccess question

[oiran]

I do websites for my friends because I can use FTP and I like to play with Dreamweaver.  This does not make me a "real" webmistress by any means.  Unfortunately, someone (or several someones) from that Russian bulletin board are hotlinking to a ton of images from Dana's webspace.  Can someone please tell me wtf htaccess is, and how one might use it?  I know nothing about server-side stuff, though I do know that everyone I help is on Apache servers (as am I).

Also, there seems to be some indication that htaccess would then make it impossible for people to use the LJ graphics stored on their webspace, though I'm not sure why... If that is the case, though, then it won't work for us, and I'll just have to rename all the files.  Feh.  But that  I know how to do.

If there are some online resources about htaccess (and other Apache commands) that someone could point me to, I'd really appreciate it. 

And now I'm going to go get vehicle emissions testing done and stand in lines. 

Comments

[twigged.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my site is with Host Cabin (in fact, I think I chose them based on a rec you made?) and it does have cPanel. I wondered whether the anti-hotlinking could be applied to a single sub-directory, or if it had to be applied to the entire site.

Anyway, jed, if you're asking this because you want the knowledge, then hoorah! but I don't really care one way or the other. And you are a real webmistress in mine eyes. You wear the "mistress" part really well. *snogs*

[stone-princess.livejournal.com]

I set Cpanel to only allow hotlinking to LJ and no where else onmy HostCabin account. I assume it's working so far...

[twigged.livejournal.com]

Well, that would definitely solve the problem, as I don't post images anywhere but on LJ. Yay!

[clari-clyde.livejournal.com]

htaccess works by trickle down — put one at the root of your site and its effects will trickle down to the subdirectories until it encounters another htaccess that overrides it.