Monthly Archives: July 2009

An Approach to Fair Ad Blocking

Wladimir Palant, author of the ever-popular AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox, recently penned an interesting article on the AdBlock blog: An approach to fair ad blocking.

As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the advertising industry. In the end, the Internet does need money to run and ads are still the most universal way to distribute that money. The only problem is that ads are becoming increasingly intrusive and annoying as webmasters try to maximize their profits which is the main reason people install Adblock Plus. So the idea is to give control back to the users by allowing them to block annoying ads. Since the non-intrusive ads would be blocked less often it would encourage webmasters to use such ads, balance restored.

Now it isn’t a secret that Adblock Plus hasn’t been performing particularly well towards that goal. While users can theoretically choose not to block ads on some sites, most users simply install Adblock Plus, choose a filter subscription (which will block all ads without exceptions) and forget about Adblock Plus.

I’ve long been one of the many who feel that ad blocking has gotten out of hand, but it certainly is interesting that the author of the extension has similar views. I think of AdBlock as a pop-up blocker; it’s for nuking the Flash ads that play sound or dance across your screen, not for removing all ads, and the publishers’ revenue with it. No, I don’t click ads, save for the occasional 125×125 banner on a tech site, if an interesting one happens to catch my eye.

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Parse a WordPress Plugin’s README.txt With Regular Expressions

I’ve been working on a neat enhancement for my Tweetable WordPress plugin. Already I have a handy “Documentation” link on the plugin’s pages in the WordPress admin. When clicked, it opens a ThickBox dialog pointing to the README.txt file. Not bad, but it had…

Display Headlines From an RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog

If you’ve ever wanted to put a list of the headlines from an RSS feed, perhaps that of another blog of your’s, somewhere on a WordPress site, there’s no need to resort to a plugin or some external script. WordPress includes the functions to…

Commercial WordPress Theme Directory? What About Plugins?

Joost de Valk thinks WordPress.org should have a section for commercial GPL-compliant plugins, like the new one for the themes. I couldn’t agree more. Of course, we plugin authors get to host our own plugins on wordpress.org, and we can get links back to…

Bigger Ads Coming Your Way Soon, Courtesy Big Media

Back in March I wrote a post about the Online Publishers Association’s plans to foist ginormous banner ads upon the masses of people who haven’t yet given into using ad-blocking software. Well, they’re on their way now. CNN, MSNBC, Forbes, and the New York…

BlogBuzz July 4, 2009

WordPress WP-Config Tricks

Digging Into WordPress recently put up an interesting article, WordPress Configuration Tricks, that covers a bunch of useful features hidden in that little-accessed part of WordPress: The wp-config.php file. [What] many users don’t know is that the wp-config.php file may be used to specify…

TweetBoard

TweetBoard is an interesting new service that sprang up a few days ago. It’s sort of a way of bringing Twitter conversation onto your website. Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near…