You can run, but you can't hide!

I'm addressing the person who invented this ad; run, run as fast and as far as you possibly can but I'm still going to find you and when I do I'm going to crack open you cranium with a length of lead pipe.

For those of you fortunate enough not to have come across this ad, here's a little snippit that explains it perfectly. It's just a flash ad, with pictures of innane smily faces with obnoxious, chipmunk voices, reminiscent of South Park, that, every so often, screams, "OH MY GAAAWWWD!!!!" at maximum volume.

If you have these ads on your site, remove them. Seriously, I know you probably want to make money from your website but there are other ways, trust me. Sure, some people will click on the ad, invariably the sort of idiots who think "ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-banana phone!" will never get tired or stale, but the rest of us, by now, have already been caught out by the ad, and, click back or close the page the second we see it.

I've already come across dozens of people complaining about this particular ad on various blogs and forums. I'm only adding mine to the pile today because I just got ambushed by another gang of them just a few moments ago, shattering the silence of my workaday world and breaking my concentration to such a degree that I just had to drop whatever I was doing and write this in a fit of rage.

Seriously though, if I stood on the street and screamed at people at the top of my voice, odds are they wouldn't stop to see what I'm selling, they'd run away - quick, and maybe call the police. Yet on the internet this seems to be a standard selling practice. I'm sure the guys who made the ad make a lot of money off it, of that I'm certain. I'm also sure a lot of people also install the smilies and who knows what else with it. And as long as this continues these guys aren't going to stop. That's why it's up to individual webmasters to boycott these types of adverts, which, in my opinion, are infinitely more annoying than popups, because not only do they make the internet a more vexing place for all of us, but they also hurt the credibility of webmasters and the traffic their sites receive.

Yahoo ads in Acrobat - uggh!

This is going to be a disaster - I just know it:

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200711/112907Yahoo.html

Think Acrobat couldn't get any more bloated and ungainly? Think again.
Yahoo are on the case, they want to bloat it up even more with ads, and Yahoo ads can be quite bloated at the best of times.

The result, I'm sure, is going to be even more ungainly, ten times more bloated and a dozen time more likely to crash Acrobat and 20 times more likely to crash your browser.
Where did I get those statistics? I just pulled them out of my ass - which is pretty much the same thing Adobe done when they came up with this supposedly-inspired idea.

Man what's with Adobe anyway? I've watched them get bigger and bigger and bigger and eat up as many other companies as possible to the point where they now own half the internet. I've also watched as they've rolled out one new version of Acrobat after another, each more bloated than the last. I thought 6 was the last straw, then they came out with seven, which constantly crashed out printers and caused windows to freeze.

The latest version is over 23megs of a download, almost 30 if you neglect to uncheck the Photoshop Album Starter Edition, it takes an eon to install and slows down your PC startup time considerably. I can't even begin to imagine the immensity of this new, ad-infested version of Acrobat, not to mention the gargantuan amount of resources it's going to consume once it's installed or the horrendous crashes that will ensure once Vista users click via IE7 on links to PDF files - I'm sure there's many shiny new laptops going to pop their processors on that one.

I can't see ads working with PDF files, I just can't. All I can see happening are lots of crashes and a huge lag time, waiting for ads which nobody's going to give a shit about. I envision a large amount of clicks will be accidental, much to the annoyance of both surfers and advertisers alike.
Not to mention all the massive updates that are going to be needed to fix the bugs and all the exploits that are going to be found in the system. I think this is setting a bad precedent here. The whole point of a PDF is that it's clear and legible and that you can print them out with ease. (Though you can ask my friend who tried to print from Acrobat 7 to his Xerox copystation about that one) Who the hell wants ads getting in the way?

I don't know why they still insist on calling it Acrobat anyway?
Acrobats are supposed to be light, nimble and flexible, not massive, bloated and sloppy.

Seriously, do yourselves a favour, use Foxit.

Some handy links and tools

Dreamstime stock photos

XML Sitemaps Generator - perfect for Yahoo and Google.

iwebtool.com - backlink checker, page rank prediction and dozens of other nifty SEO and web tools

Keyword Density Analyser

Website Grader - another nifty SEO tool

And finally...
How much is your website worth?

Honestly I can't seen any practical reason that last one and I can't see how it actually rates the sites at all but it's cool to look at anyway and gives you a warm feeling to know that your website's worth a small fortune.