Monday, January 17, 2005

Spy vs Spy with blinkies

I'm not really against advertisements. But I am against blinkies. I hate blinking distractions. So, when some nimrod invented the blink attribute on text, I did what I could to avoid it. And some moron invented animated GIF files. That was tolerable until people started filling their web pages with ads made up of blinking animated GIFs.

Then I learned to turn off GIF animation in Mozilla. And I was happy for a while.

Then some moron started using flash animation in ads and for the longest time, I had that turned off. But then they figured out how to make those ads blink. And I figure out how to not see them:

1. I move the Mozilla window off the screen so that the blinkie won't appear.

2. I hold my hand over the blinkie so that it won't distract me when I'm reading.

3. I keep post-its next to my screen and place the post-it over the blinkie.

Tonight I found a wonderful thing called "ad blocker" that's a mozilla plug-in. It's simplicity itself to install. And it's wonderful. When I see a blinkie that bothers me, I click on a tab next to it that says, "Ad Blocker" and I click it and walla, the ad is gone.

Like I said, I believe that internet advertising is a good thing and I encourage web advertising. HOWEVER, I'm putting the web advertisers on notice. I hate blinkies. I won't block any advertisements that do not blink. I will block all advertisements that do blink.

Dear Advertisers: you'll figure out a way past ad-blocker and I'll curse you and get out the post-its again. But if you want me to actually do business with you, put your message in non-blinking form.

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