Ad-blockers. Browser plug-ins that get rid of website adverts. Nasty, annoying adverts. And Adblock Plus for Firefox is one of the most popular add-ons that you can get.

Except, of course, the reason why so much on the web is free is because they make some money from these adverts. Suppress them and they end of withdrawing the service or charging for it. Usually it’s the former.

The Copy+ website provides a unique, useful piece of software for free. Instead, we make money from licensing and from some non-evasive adverts at the top and bottom of each page. So, as I’m sure you can imagine, I’m not keen on ad-blockers.

However, I’ve had a number of Copy+ visitors reporting that with Adblock running the website doesn’t display properly. I’ve had a look and – yep – I can see it happening but sure as hell don’t know why (because I don’t know how Adblock is working).

So, I posted to the Adblock forum. Instead of some useful advice, I got criticism of my code. Yes, it was my fault. My fault that it worked perfectly fine with Adblock turned off but then didn’t with it turned on. Of course. How foolish of me.

So, guess what? That’s right – I’m going to change the site to detect Adblock and not let you on if you have it installed or turned on. The Adblock people could have just helped me work with it, but they weren’t prepared to. It’s only fair.

Ok, I’ve spoken about CAPTCHA‘s before. After reading an article on the BBC site, though, I was ready to change mine once again.

reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA with a difference. Many books are being scanned digitally for posterity but, as well know, character recognition is not perfect – often words can’t be read by a computer. So when you use reCAPTCHA is presents you with two words. One is a word that couldn’t be read by OCR. The other is a word that is known. You don’t know which is which. During the CAPTCHA process you enter both words. If the word that it knows is correct is correct, then it assumes the other is too. When the unknown word is tried by a number of people, all giving the same answer, they know what the word is and can update their digitized document.

So, in a nutshell, it helps digitize books. And what a fantastic idea that is.

It’s also free and provides a speech method for those with sight problems.

It can be found on both the BMTG and Copy+ contact pages.

..my head is getting far too big.

I recently added a nice utility named Amberjack to my Copy+ site that produces site tours.

The Amberjack technical forum has been reporting problems with some tours not working in IE. Yet mine did. They couldn’t work it out. Until they validated the HTML. Mine was clean, theirs had errors.

Well, I don’t wish to say “I told you so”, but I’ve banging on about the advantages of clean code since… well… a long time. And I guess this proved my point.

Both this and my BMTG site follow the same rules (except the YouTube code breaks it… nothing much I can do about that though) and neither have had any issues with cross-browser compatibility.