RSS feedWatch out for ad blockers when designing your site
A few months back, when I was doing some work on a website that I’m working on in my spare time, I ran into a strange problem. I uploaded a new banner to the front page of the site, and it mysteriously refused to show up on my development machine. Mysteriously, when I inspected it using Firebug, it was greyed out, and no amount of tweaking the CSS on the fly made the slightest bit of difference.
It turned out that the problem was a Firefox extension that I use called Adblock Plus. It blocks adverts on websites largely based on a long list of default regular expressions. I’d been placing the offending images in a directory called /images/adverts, and that had been tripping it.
Needless to say, I haven’t put anything in that directory into production for quite a while now, but the folder is still there in source control, and I still keep forgetting and adding things to it. I must get round to removing it altogether.
The moral of the story: make sure that you don’t have the word “advert” anywhere in the URLs of your images. There are other expressions that will trip it, so it’s a good idea to test against it just to make sure.
Posted at 08:00 on 25 February 2009.
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say anything that 
18:07
I just hope no advertisers read your blog