Why is my Craigslist ad broken?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve already tried writing to Craiglist support and, I suppose unsurprisingly, received no response.

I have messed with the code of the ad every which way from Tuesday and can’t figure out why it’s not working.

Ad here.

Basically, when I click on the ad, the image fails to show up. However, if I go to the URL of the image (http://lh4.ggpht.com/_Vp2xY3Qk1wM/SbV4rZVVFXI/AAAAAAAADZ4/cLaXeQftHZI/photo-ad.jpg), and then go back to the ad, there it is.

I’ve checked a dozen other Craigslist ads that also include images, and no others seem to have this problem. I click the ad, the image is visible immediately.

Obviously the Craigslist system does some of it’s own mucking about with the code after I submit it, but looking at the source I can’t see anything that would cause this, especially since I can “fix” it by viewing the image outside of the ad.

The code I enter is below. Does anyone have sufficient experience with the Craigslist system to tell me what’s going on, and how to fix it? (Or am I the only one having this weird problem? Maybe everyone else can see the image just fine, for all I know.)



<b><a href="http://autumneve.com/photographer/gallery/">Autumn Eve dot com</a></b>
<br>
<b>Photographer</b>

<p>
» <a href="http://www.autumneve.com/photographer/rates.php">Rates</a>
<br>
» <a href="http://www.autumneve.com/contact.php">Contact</a>
</p>

<p>Kat O'Connor is a creative professional with nearly ten years of experience across multiple areas of marketing, design, and the arts. The philosophy I bring to my creative ventures is to "tell the story," as I believe storytelling is integral to the human psyche and a key method through which we understand and interact with the world. Telling the story is a way of sharing information that has a profound impact, engaging the audience's interest and emotional response, and occasionally challenging established perceptions and habits of thinking.</p>

<p>I specialize in distinctive portraiture that captures the unguarded moments when you are the most comfortable in your own skin. I strive to tell your story, to show your experience, to reveal the true you.</p>

<p><a href="http://autumneve.com/photographer/gallery/"><img border="0" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_Vp2xY3Qk1wM/SbV4rZVVFXI/AAAAAAAADZ4/cLaXeQftHZI/photo-ad.jpg"></a></p>

I’ve already tried hosting the image at a different location… in fact, the current URL was my second choice, because the first one wouldn’t work no matter what I did.

2

Not sure what’s up, but there definately is something strange. When I clicked on the craigslist ad, I saw no image. I then clicked on the link in the OP that linked to the image, and I got a 404 page, refreshing didn’t change anything, but when I pasted the image url into the address bar, the image came up, and after that it would show up in the craigslist ad, and going straight to the image no longer brings up the 404.

3

What are you hosting the image on? Is this via Google’s hosted pages or something?

Most likely they have disabled “hotlinking” to images, meaning you can’t embed it in a page outside of their servers.

I would try using an image hosting service that allows hotlinking, or just use CL’s embedded image hosting.

(For those of you interested in the details, when you make an HTTP request for the image it includes a “referrer” field containing the address of the site that referred you to the current resource. Google sees the request came from craigslist or SDMB, not its own servers and delivers a 404. If you enter the URL directly in the address bar, your browser sends a request with an empty referrer field and the Google returns the image. When you navigate back to the original page, your browser has already cached the image on your hard drive, so it shows up fine.)

4

It’s not a hotlinking issue – or at least, not a normal one. The first location I attempted to host the image at was my own website, where I do all of the admin, and hotlinking protection is disabled. It still didn’t work. And I did have an extended conversation with my webhost support team – everything was working properly on that end.

http://autumneve.com/photographer/ads/photo-ad.jpg

The image currently in the ad is hosted on my Google/Picasa account.

(And CL embedded image hosting is apparently not available for the services offered section. As far as I can tell, that’s only available for personal ads.)

5

Hm that’s weird, when I change the image URL in the CL ad from Google to your site it works fine for me (no problem hotlinking from your site).

Anyway, here is a blog post with some info about embedding Picasa images outside the album
http://sam.davyson.com/weblog/hotlinking-picasa-web-albums-images/

Maybe its a CL restriction, sorry I can’t be of more help.

6

Okay, I’ve tried changing the ad such that the image is pulled from my website instead of Picasa. At this point when viewing the ad I can’t make the image show up at all, not even by viewing the image separately first. Is this what you all are getting?

If this were a CL restriction, I’d expect to see the same problem with every other ad in creative services that includes an image, but as far as I can tell I’m the only one.

rrrrrrr…

7

Shows up fine for me. Perhaps it’s something odd with your computer. I would try viewing the page in a different browser or on a friend’s computer.

8

It shows up fine for me too

9

Weird. And annoying. I can see it in IE, apparently, but not in Firefox (although again, not an issue with anyone else’s ad. WTF?)

I looked at the “embed” code listed on Picasa, which turns out is slightly different than just grabbing the image URL. Trying that, it seems to be working now.

I’d say that CL just apparently hates private websites, but I’ve seen several other ads which host the image on their own sites instead of the public ones like Flikr and PhotoBucket, so notta clue.

(It sucks cuz looking at the hit stats on the image would give me a good idea how many people are looking at the ad… as it is, I can only count the number of people who click through. Oh well.)

10

You probably have AdBlocker on Firefox, which has a habit of not displaying any image with the word “ad” in the name (or the folder name).

In order to make sure this doesn’t trip up others with AdBlocker, change the name of the file.

11

Aaand that was it exactly. Wow I’m a moron. (I work with ads all the time. I know this stuff.) I’ve spent two weeks on this, pulling my hair out. Duhr! :stuck_out_tongue:

Filepath changed, everything works.

Thank you!