I’m a frequent reader of Pitchforkmedia and have always been frustrated with how many ads they have. I’ve also been using Adblock Plus for a while and have come built up a pretty substantial white/black list (it supports both).
Unfortunately, Pitchfork uses an annoyingly effective way to get around Adblock. Essentially they (warning: speculation) use Javascript to write more Javascript which, I assume, gets executed after Adblock has run through the source of the site. Ah but they didn’t think of how sweet Firefox is.
Firefox has a setting (in the “Content” section of the preferences) called “Load images automatically.” Obviously you want this to be enabled (how annoying would it be if it wasn’t?) but…wait a second. What if we didn’t want images to load for a certain site? The FF developers are one step ahead of us.
Next to the check box is an “Exceptions…” button that let’s you define block/allow settings on a per site basis (just like when setting cookie exceptions). When I added ahs.pitchforkmedia.com to the block list, voila!
Oh wait…that only blocks images. As in that flashy Flash ads are still there.
Honestly, that’s fine with me. My biggest problem was that all the ads were overwhelming. With the images gone the Flash ads are much easier to ignore.
This isn’t a perfect solution but it made me a lot happier and hopefully you will be too.
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