Reading the printer-friendly version of articles removes distractions.
To my great chagrin a number of signal-heavy sites now have ads scattered all over their articles, breaking up the flow and generally getting in the way. Not to mention the Flash ads that whirl and blink or the DHTML ads that seem to want to take over the entire screen. I'm looking at you IBM, and ITworld.com and cnet.com and all the others that for years have had great technical/business/whatever-you-want articles but who now waste my time and visual bandwidth with their crappy, non-targetted ads.
No more.
From now on I will be reading only the "printer-friendly" version of these articles. This version contains no ads (well, there may be some but they are usually at the top or bottom) and in general has a better layout since they have removed the ugly navigation that these providers have managed to plaster all over 2/3 of my screen.
On a related note, check out Greasemonkey - a firefox extension that allows you to run custom DHTML for each site you visit. By default this extension ships with a script that disables Google ads. When I say disables, I actually mean hides since the original GET to the server actually returns the HTML page with the ads built in but Greasemonkey strips it out on the client side. So your favourite blogger is still reaping the benefits of the ad bar but you don't have to suffer the indignity of giving up screen real-estate.
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2 comments:
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By default this extension ships with a script that disables Google ads.
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I'm involved with Greasemonkey it does not ship with ad-blocking user scripts. There are plenty of ad blocking scripts that have been written, but Greasemonkey's install only includes:
ununderline
and
Linkify
We may include others scripts at some point, but I doubt we'll ever include ad blockers in the install.
Perhaps you installed an ad blocker and forgot?
Hmmm... I was pretty sure that it did. I may have gotten carried away and just installed another user script. I'll look into this. Sorry for the mis-information.
If you are not involved with Greasemonkey you should still download it and check it out!
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