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Filed under: Fun, Utilities

Add-Art is an ad blocker and an art show in one

Of all the unlikely places to curate an art show, the ad space on websites has to be one of the most unlikely. Instead of shocking a monkey or being invited to meet some "adult friends," how about looking at a selection of art that changes every two weeks? The Add-Art plugin for Firefox comes packaged with Adblock Plus, but instead of removing the ads entirely, it displays images from the current show.

Replacing ads with art sounded a bit hokey to me at first, but its the curation that makes this idea brilliant. There's something uplifting about a campaign to take a space in a website's layout, that people were just going to throw away with ad-blockers anyway, and repurpose it to show them something new. Looking through the past exhibits, one of the more interesting projects was curated by having Amazon Mechanical Turk workers select their favorites: a clever, populist approach to art, made possible by the web.

[via Andrew Richardson on Twitter]

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Browsers

Safari updates messing with your ad blocker? Try GlimmerBlocker.


If you use some popular ad blocking add-ons for Safari (like the excellent PithHelmet), you may have run into problems when a new version of Safari was released. Updating can break your ad-blocker or cause Safari to crash until a new version of the plugin is released. This isn't a big deal to me, because Safari 3.2-compatible version of PithHelmet has already been released. If you're crazy about stability, though, GlimmerBlocker is offering an alternative.

GlimmerBlocker is downright derisive of other ad blocking options, explaining on their website that "The problem with other ad-blockers for Safari is that they are implemented as awful hacks ...This compromises the stability of Safari ..." Instead of using InputManagers, GlimmerBlocker works by http proxy. This is handy if you're using nightly builds of WebKit that other methods of adblocking can't keep up with. You do unfortunately have to make some small sacrifices for the stability: GlimmerBlocker won't stop pop-unders or filter cookies from 3rd-party sites.

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