Mobile users attention: Editing blogposts from mobile can inject wrong image paths
2014
Today, I had a talk with one of my clients about quite a strange behavior of his WordPress webpage. Sometimes, he uses mobile in order to update and edit his blogposts. The strange thing. After a while, the pictures in his blogposts didn’t work anymore. What did happen?
His mobile internet provider is Vodaphone, who obviously works together with ByteMobile. According to their webpage, they are working together with more than 100 companies. What does ByteMobile do?
Since mobile internet provider try to reduce bandwith, one of the offers ByteMobile has for his clients, to compress images, before they are delivered to the client. This video explains a bit, whats going on:
While this technique may have real advantages, making the mobile internet expierence quite fast, it can be a huge problem for WordPress administrators and editors, who edit their blogposts online. With the compression technique, ByteMobile actually changes the Image-URLs in the HTML-Code and links them for example to
http://1.1.1.1/bmi/my-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/my-image.jpg.
So, while I want to show a picture at http://my-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/my-image.jpg, my inserted SRC-Attribute actually changes to http://1.1.1.1/bmi/my-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/my-image.jpg because this is the picture I am looking at. While I edit the page or post, there is no difference, but as soon as I access the blogpost from another provider, another time or whatever: The picture is gone. And there is no hint, what is going on. If you try to access this new address, no information is given, what is going on here.
About a year ago Marcus Rönz from Webmaster Glossar wrote a blogpost about this issue.
For WordPress users who run into this problem, I wrote the plugin BMI Remover, which solves this problem by hooking into the ‘save_post’ and ‘edit_post’ filter and rewriting misleading URLs. This is the currently known ByteMobile-URL-List, which can be rewritten:
- 1.1.1.1/bmi/
- 1.1.1.2/bmi/
- 1.1.1.3/bmi/
- 1.1.1.4/bmi/
- 1.1.1.5/bmi/
- 1.2.3.4/bmi/
- 1.2.3.9/bmi/
- 1.2.3.10/bmi/
- 1.2.3.11/bmi/
If you no other URLs, please let me know.
