More About Links
I haven’t posted too many links the last couple days. I have a bunch of guitar links to post – like I said before, my links come in waves, but I’m not sure I want to post them all. Some of them generate popups. I have nothing against the responsible use of popups, mind you. Some sites rely on them for revenue. I used them myself on the first two web projects I created (here and here – Both are under different management now.), but I don’t like the way some publishers use them.
Anyway, I did a search for guitar tablature and starting opening up results in tabs.1. As I clicked through the tabs it was clear that some sites were using popups onLoad and/or onExit. The interesting thing is that I couldn’t tell which sites. When I clicked one tab I would see another tab open with an ad, but I wasn’t sure if the ad was triggered by the site I was leaving or the one I was entering. It was an interesting (and somewhat annoying) experience. I don’t see a lot of popups partly because I use FireFox, and partly because I don’t normally visit the kinds of sites that typically use them. I began to wonder if I wanted to link to these sites at all.So where do I draw the line? On the one hand, I don’t put much effort into ‘reviewing’ sites before I post. My linkblog is not intended to be a set of recommendations. Normally I find a site I think someone may find a site interesting and I just click a toolbar button and tag it in del.icio.us. Don’t think too much about it. I click, pick a tag I think someone may use to search and I’m done. If I want to Furl the site for my benefit, I also attach the 2furl tag.On the other hand, I want the visitors to not hate the experience when they follow a link from my site. Will my readers hold a grudge for my behavior in this regard?I guess if I have a few extra minutes tomorrow I’ll load the pages one at a time and see which ones are the offenders.
FireFoxFireFox is the world’s best browser and is available for linux, windows and mac. It is highly customizable, has built-in RSS support, tabbed browsing and stops many of the popups (but not all obviously) you are destined to endure with inferior browsers.