I’ve been pained for several years by the ads in one of my RSS feeds.
Mozilla Thunderbird (my program of choice for handling e-mail and RSS feeds) waits until it has all of the images for a message before rendering any of the message, including its text. That’s fine, I don’t mind text or non-animated ads — except when I’m trying to quickly skim through several weeks’ worth of messages to find ones that might be useful, and the ad provider’s website is so slow that it takes ten seconds for a particular message’s text to be displayed. That’s about 9.5 seconds more than I’m willing to wait.
Last night, trying to get caught up on my unread messages, I decided that I’d had enough. A quick Control-U to display the HTML source for the message, a few moments of study to identify the URLs of the two ridiculously slow ad providers, and a few seconds to edit the /etc/hosts file to tell my system that those sites were hosted on itself (where there’s no web server, so it gives up immediately), and the ads in that feed were toast. I finished my skimming in record time.
The moral of the story: if you want your ads seen by technical people like me, choose an ad provider that has sufficient capacity that it doesn’t cause us any trouble. Because if it irritates us too much, we can and will block it. You only get one shot at that, because we’re not likely to ever have a reason to unblock it again if that happens.
Thunderbird is an OK email reader, but a fairly poor RSS reader. You might want to try something more optimized to RSS reading, a lot of good free readers are available.
Thunderbird does well enough for the RSS feeds that I need, and I’d prefer to keep it all in a single program.
True, if you have too many programs on your system, you’ll run out of space on your 65,536GB hard drive. 😉
As I’m pretty sure you know, it’s more a matter of having everything that I need to pay attention to in a single window. :-p
If that’s what you want to do, you could always use webmail too, and browser-based RSS readers like Google’s or Bloglines. It seems everyone else has drunk the HTML-is-as-good-as-desktop-apps coolaid, why not join them? 😉
As you definitely know — because I’ve told you before — I don’t like letting someone else control my information. I’d rather have it under my own control, so no one can conveniently “disappear” something that they don’t want people reading anymore, for whatever reason.
A quaint notion privacy, and avoiding censorship. Please tell me of your strange ideas, man of the 20th century. 😉