Banned

Suuuuuuure, just try to replace more things on the internet. Cast down your paltry banner images people, here comes Lord Inman. pish tosh.

I’ve often wondered why the internet doesn’t put forth more effort to cater to my personal fleeting whims. ;)

Oh, and Jason, color me impressed for knowing the proper turn of the phrase! Here I thought I was the only one…

I do this already… for a while now, actually! There are many good ad blockers out there and most of them chock on such names and/or specific image sizes.

All in all, we’re not see the page as the author intended, so I’m still torn on this issue. I guess people will try to avoid banner and ads regardless.

My berating you incessantly is just my way of agreeing with you. :D

I experience the same problem with PithHelmet every once in awhile. Andy Budd’s header image does not load for me when I have PithHelmet on.

Ah, nothing says “I love you” quite like constant emotional torment, eh Jason?

Shaun, I definitely see what you’re getting at, although I have found that ad-blockers are rarely as big of a problem as all of the ungodly crap (ad-ware, virii, et al.) that clients/bosses invariably have installed on their machines that will screw all my hard work. There’s nothing quite as gratifying as getting interrogated about why your newest design is full of pop-up ads. Trying to explain generally leads to a dismissive hand wave and “Just fix it, okay?”

Just once I’d like to beat JSM to the punch with a witty comment of my own. I always have one in mind and find that I’ve been totally upstaged before I even get here. Damn you, JSM. :)

I don’t understand what the problem is here. Do you have a rule blocking all instances of “banner.gif”?

I have come across this issue before, but in a different guise.

When producing a site for a big client, we had reports of parts of the ui not appearing [a week before launch!]. We tested and tested and couldn’t reproduce the effect, eventually we found that it was only happening in XP IE6 and none of the other IE flavours even though IE6 should be the same on WIN2K [this was pre SP2].

When I eventually got my mitts on a XP machine I discovered when looking at the source that the parts that were not appearing had been REMOVED from the source. It turns out that because I had a random image in the sidebar that I was keeping in a directory called ‘adbox’ due to it advertising internal areas of the site, XP was deleting it from the source. Changing the folder name to ‘sidebox’ fixed the issue.

The XP in use was a default setup with no ad blocking to my knowledge.

This problem like you said ‘undermined’ my credibility on an otherwise faultless job.

M$ never cease to amaze me!

Shaun,

Couldn’t you just… disable some of that? I understand how ad-blockers work. I use the AdBlock extension for Firefox, and it’s quite a blessing. The only annoyance I have with it is on sites like yours where I see the AdBlock tab next to every Flash-replaced heading… :-

I wonder if I can turn that tab off…

Happened to me once before as well. For about half a year I didn’t realise Andy Budd’s Blogography had a header image, and I just assumed the big white space at the top was part of the design. The light was shown to me when I accessed the site again on a friend’s machine.

Of course, he’s changed the name now, so we don’t get that problem.

Hmm… I just upgraded to the official 1.0 release of FF, and it looks like AdBlock no longer does the tabby-thingy.

Gah… I go back to my hole now.

Seth -

For future referene,you can indeed (manually) disable the tabs on blocked Flash bits in AdBlock:

In Firefox: Tools -> AdBlock -> Preferences. Click on AdBlock Options, then uncheck the Obj-Tabs item. Ta-da!

At least I think this is what you were looking for.

• Vince

“It turns out that because I had a random image in the sidebar that I was keeping in a directory called ‘adbox’ due to it advertising internal areas of the site, XP was deleting it from the source.”

Tom, not to doubt your story, but it sounds more like those XP users had some sort of plugin (probably spyware or adware) acting like a proxy and filtering content. I think some adware likes replacing competitors’ ads with its own, and some even modifies the Windows networking files.

Ugh, Windows, I’m so glad I dumped that beast.

I would imagine that this would do this for quite a few names other than ‘banner.ext’. Let’s just hope that the advertising industry don’t catch on to this and start changing their filenames to things such as ‘logo’, ‘header’ or ‘sidebar’. Then I’d be really pissed when those started getting blocked…

Shaun,

I understand that, but would a less savvy user be blocking “banner.gif” or “banner.anything” anyway? I would think the less savvy users are gonna be the ones adding rules on a file by file basis, and ignoring generalities, patterns, etc. altogether.

(Derr… I neglected to take into account your note that many ad blockers come with certain patterns and things set by default. This is not the case in my experience, so I didn’t think of it. Seems silly that they would block something as generic as “banner” though. No, silly is not the word… “ridiculous” works better.)

Honestly, does it matter if he can “block” it or not? Not trying to cause any trouble here, but personally, I think if it’s a problem for one person, it could very well be a problem for many people. And if it were me, I’d want to remedy that.

Anyhow, I’ve always wondered why people call it banner in the first place. I have always looked at it as a header, as banner makes me think automatically of a banner ad. shrugs

Either way, I usually use logo.gif for the logo - it just made sense to me. :)

I wonder how “header.gif” is any more descriptive than “banner.gif” or similar? They are both equally generic - and thus equally useful for site-wide graphics, or equally not useful, for asset management. If a different banner/header.gif is used on each section, these would be organized into sub-folders by section. This context would make asset management a non-issue (it’s obvious that news/banner.gif is the news banner graphic, for instance) and furthermore could make site management easier by writing scripts to place these graphics automatically based on their location in the directory structure (both web scripts and scripts to actually generate these graphics via Photoshop actions/Applescript/etc.). In short, your solution is as bad as the problem - and, what’s the problem?

You know what, that had never crossed my mind. You have brought up a great point here. I’ve had a couple people tell me that my “banner.gif” will not show up for them, and this is probably the reason why. Thanks for insight.

Well, y’know I can see your point Shaun.

It may be a worthwhile tidbit for naming in future, but I wonder how many people use PithHelmet, and whether it should be PithHelmet that needs adjustment.

I use a number of ad blocking approaches, and have never had this type of problem, so I guess its kinda PithHelmet-centric.

I was reading this article (no idea where it’s at) but it talks about optimizing your image names for google searches. so for instance in this case instead of using logo.gif you should use something more like your-site-name.gif or your-subject-logo.gif. for example web-design-standards-logo.gif (maybe that’s a bit long)…

in essnse, it would almost be just as important as your title tags in your document header….kinda like SEO for images I guess…

anyway…just a thought.

Rather than trying to filter images at the URL level, why not block them at the DNS level (ie. a HOSTS file entry, or alternatively something more dynamic like DNSKong?)

The latter is an awesome program I’ve been using for years, I love it. It’s effectively a DNS proxy between your computer and your ISP’s DNS, the benefit being you can blacklist or whitelist combinations of words or names (eg. any domain starting with “ads.”)

Coupled with “eDexter” (a super-lightweight HTTP server which nulls the redirected requests, substituting 1x1 transparent GIFs and commented-out JS,) it makes for a more enjoyable, pop-up/under and overall ad-free experience.

Both DNSKong and eDexter are freely available. pyrenean.com

I’d probably suggest you recheck your blocking statements and verify if there is a setting that is triggering that issue. Id probably also suggest you may want to check your cookies lol beleive it or not that happens to a lot of my customers ( Verizon Online ) and I can usually have it fixed in a jiffy. I don’t have a uber techy lingo for it but I feel its usually a statement that has it blocking out some of the sites even precisely off the named conotation that some advertisers follow by.

This is a problem with Norton Internet Security ‘05 too. I’ve seen loads of sites with bits missing, a whole navigation bar and logo in one case. Easily fixed by avoiding the word banner in any of your code, including the CSS file.

Why all my images are called via CSS.

And I don’t like the idea of snuffing ads. Hosting costs money. Especially on high-bandwidth sites, like those whom host videos.