5.2 request

[Peter Nicholson]

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Frank,

I'm not certain that this will do what you want, mainly because I have 
over 20 ad-killing expressions with no way that I know of to test any 
of them on their own without deleting the lot and then re-entering each 
one (having checkboxes to enable / disable each individual expression 
would be nice, OW guys!) -- but adding this string to OW's adblock 
prefs has blocked all Yahoo ad content site-wide, as far as I can tell:

.*\.a1\.yimg\..*

Fwiw, the easiest way I've found to create new ad filters** is to 
option-click (/ right-click / whatever pops your menu) on the offending 
article (or preferably several from the same page / site, so you have a 
good-sized sample), and choose Image/Filter Image. Then I open OW 
AdBlock Preferences and take a look at the Blocked URLs list.

For example, on www.nytimes.com most or all of the ad content comes 
from "www.nytimes.com/adx/randomstringofcharactersblahblahblah". 
Instead of trying to figure out the proper regex format to block 
anything emanating from that specific directory, I just use ".*adx.*" 
as the string to block. Note that this gives me problems with 'adx.com' 
or 'bADXray.gif' or anything containing that string, but it's as close 
to keyword blocking as OW gets.

In short, pick your list of 'evil' words; 'doubleclick', 'ads', 
'advertising' etc; put '.*' on the front and end to match that word 
appearing in any context, and you've got the 
smashing-flies-with-a-sledgehammer method of adblocking.

Peter

** I've tried privoxy and squid as well; if I had a fixed location, 
broadband, and a faster machine I'd probably use one or both of them 
esp. as they work regardless of which browser I'm running; but for my 
setup, a G3 Powerbook and dialup, the decrease in speed coupled with 
having to disable or reconfigure their filter settings ever time I 
switched from home to work made them impractical.

On Friday, Jan 7, 2005, at 11:53 US/Eastern, Frank wrote:

> I've noticed that since I tweaked Camino with a custom css to block the
> most common ads, I've moved back to Camino.  I am no good with regular
> expressions and I just can't seem to filter what I want filtered in
> OW.  I've never been able to block the "header images" on the My.Yahoo
> page, no matter what I've tried.  And so, I end up back with Camino.
> (I support OW by being a paying customer, tho.)


Peter Nicholson
superhancpetram at earthlink.net
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