Archive for May 2010
After years of stating my preference for 3ds Max after finding my initial exploration of Maya’s UI cumbersome at best…I’m starting to rethink things a bit. After experiencing a curious bug involving viewport backgrounds in Max that cost me way too much time to “fix”, I’ve started a bit of training into Maya.
While I’m going along, my dislike of the UI is starting to fade to the point where I’m ready to admit that it’s not cumbersome – just different. In addition to that, I’m starting to see some things that seem to be easier to do in Maya from the start than it is to do in Max – all inexperience in Maya and experience in Max included. Although I still reserve the right to keep my original opinion in the end, Maya has certainly shown me enough to give it a fair shot in changing that.
Today we’re going to talk about banner ads. Now, I know, banner ads are old news – they’re practically as old as the internet itself. However, I’ve been seeing examples of something that’s relatively new – and I really don’t like it.
See, banner ads always came off as a little cheap – they generally destroy the look of a site, and their entire point was to simply make the website owner money without doing anything. But y’know what? That’s understandable. After all, “free” money is hard to resist. But there is nothing understandable about playing the pity card with Adblock users.
Yes, certain websites include a script for the sole purpose of checking whether or not you’re blocking banner ads on their site, and will (at best) include a message on their site begging you to “Whitelist” their site, because *sob* they need the money. No. Just… no. First of all, with the cheapness of shared hosting that has more features than you’ll probably ever use (we’re talking less than $10/month) - you’re coming off like you’re the worst con man in the world.
On top of that, somewhere along the line you’ve forgotten how the internet works. There are billions of websites out there and there’s a good chance that at least one of those websites does things better than you. If you have people that choose to go to your site, the last thing you should do is to guilt them into doing something that they shouldn’t ever have to. Setting up rules for member conduct is one thing, but to try to guilt someone into changing a browser setting just for your insignificant little site? That’s a little presumptuous of you don’t you think?
This practice alone is pretty annoying, but what happens when you mix JavaScript with it? One particular Sims site decided to push the envelope. By that I mean choose to remind everybody why so many web surfers hated JavaScript for so long. See, instead of just putting a little guilt message at the top of the page, this shining example of web developers decided to use the old JavaScript Alert box method. Not only that, but he included it within the header of the entire site. So instead of just one message…it popped up this Alert box on every. single. page.
I imagine the web designer’s goal was to annoy people into submission and I imagine it worked quite well for those who really wanted to be on the site, but didn’t know any other way to get around it. I am not one of those people. Oh, I certainly did want to view the site, but the more a site annoys me, the more I want to fix it. So after a quick Google search, I found that you can add JavaScript exceptions based on domain in Firefox’s userprefs file. So I did. I blocked any use of the Alert function on that domain, and the annoyance stopped.
Again, nobody’s demanding that you just run a site at a loss, deny yourself any income, or not make requests for donations – it’s your site after all, and your time and money going into it. Remember though, it’s your site that visitors are viewing in their browser. Don’t request, guilt or demand that viewers change their browser unless you’re prepared to follow requests and give into demands and guilt to change content on your site.
