I’ve taken down the Funny Signs (Intro to Semiotics) page from the website. I logged in to find that in a single day, many gigs of bandwidth had been burned by someone hotlinking to my images there.
Initially, I tried to simply prevent hotlinking to images by altering my .htaccess file, but it turns out that also blocks RSS programs and breaks images on my own blog syndication. So I’m back to allowing hotlinking, and have just removed the files that tended to be linked to.
If someone finds a more elegant solution (say, allowing hotlinking to blog images but not main site images), please let me know.