17.3.06
Ad zapping with a proxy
I hate adverts on websites, and I find the Google text ads some of the worst as they can completely ruin the flow of the text. This is worst on many blogger sites, where an advert will be inserted straight into the area where the text content of the blog is concerned and often, frankly, it just looks ugly, not to mention highly confusing if you are trying to read the entry online.The graphical ads are usually tolerable, as long as they are placed in a suitable location that allows the text of the content to flow around the ad itself, just as it it were a photo or image as part of an article. That doesn't mean I like them any better, but least you can more easly tell where the ad begins and ends. More annoying are those animated and flash ads that have an annoying habit of sapping CPU time while you view them, to varying degrees.Long ago I used a proxy server between my network and the Internet to help filter out the adverts, but when I moved home and changed network organization I lost the proxy server and moved to web-based filtering with Firefox.I gave up Firefox long ago, not because I was anti-Firefox (I still recommend it to everybody), but as a mainly Mac OS X user, I appreciate the OS integration that Safari provides. I still use Firefox on my Windows and Unix/Linux machines exclusively.Filtering across all those systems however was inconsistent, so I'm back to border-level filtering. Fortunately Gentoo supports AdZapper. A simple emerge of AdZapper and Squid (AdZapper will also work with Apache and some other solutions). A quick reconfigure to use the new proxy server, and the addition of a few lines into the Squid configuration file and I now have a network-wide ad zapping service that gives consistency no matter what Browser I'm using. By Martin MC Brown |
