Eliminate those annoying advertising popup windows from your blog

One of my pet hates in this world, its in my top 5 list, are those annoying popup advertising windows you see on a lot of websites. They infuriate me because they keep appearing over and over again. On some websites, when you click to go to a new page a dammed popup up advertising window will show up. Now, to make things even worse is getting embed codes from these websites, or any website really, only to find a damned popup advertising window shows up on your blog.

I have had this problem for a very long time, perhaps a year now. At first I didn't know where the first popup advertising window came from, and I done everything but delete my entire blog. I went through every bit of code on my blog but still couldn't find the code for the popup advertising window. Then I started thinking the code itself does not actually exist as a visible code that you can simply remove. If only things were that easy!

Over time I came to learn that these popup advertising windows are invisibly attached to certain objects you add to your blog. They are like a computer virus - but more like an internet virus. They are normally attached to widgets you add to your blog. For example, the website http://www.geovisites.com looks fine when you visit it but the moment you add their widget you end up with a popup advertising window on your blog or website. Even if you delete their links within the widget itself you still end up with the popup advertising window and you can't get rid of it.

However there is a drastic solution to all of this. That solution is to not only delete that widget that created a popup advertising window you got from the website but you also have to delete your entire blog template too. If you don't delete the widget first and you just decide to delete your template, you end up with the same popup advertising window attached to your new template. Its really a vicious circle!

No matter what you do to your blog, or how nice you have made it, it only takes one popup advertising window attached to your site to make you regret ever having placed widgets on your site in the first place. Advertising popup windows can be blocked altogether by programmes that are free to download but that is not the point. Not everyone will have an ad blocker on their computer. Not everyone can see your blog like you  can if you have an ad blocker. You would not, in this case, even see the advertising popup windows but everyone else who doesn't have that programme can.

As a blogger you have a duty to perform, not only for youself but for others too. Your duty is to make your site as accessible as possible to other people. If you want people to continuously come back to your site you must make your site safe for them to visit. Are advertising popup windows safe? I am not about to click on one of them to find out!

HERE'S SOME FREE ADVICE: Let's say you want to add a movie to your blog, as I had done in the past. NEVER, EVER, EVER embed a movie from www.movies2k.to. You will end up with an ILivid popup advertising window that not only you can't get rid of but it also tries to download the ILivid movie manager application onto your computer. Watching movies on that site is fine. I don't trust the site to download any of their movies....who knows what would be downloaded to your computer - even if you got the movie at all. (However, downloading movies from this site using the Real Player download function is quite safe and I do this all the time.)

Any time you ever want to add something to your blog or website, use this rule of thumb: If any popup advertising windows show up on a website you are trying to get something from, DON'T GET IT FROM THAT SITE! Keep your site safe and free of popup advertising windows. If you don't you will simply lose out and visitors will refuse to come back to your site. If you do have popup advertising windows showing up on your site, the only way to track them down is to revisit each site you got your widgets from. If a popup advertising window shows up from any of the sites delete that widget straight away. Do this with all your widgets.

But, these popup advertising windows will not only just show up because they are connected to certain widgets, they can also occur because you have linked your site to a website that has these popup windows on their site. Once that direct connection between your site and their site occurs, your site is also going to display the same popup advertising windows.

Some time ago on a blog I had that no longer exists I had a chatbox widget. In that chatbox were links to some people's websites/blogs - belonging to my visitors. They kindly left me their url and so I checked them all out. However, a few of the urls I clicked on simply refused to load because they had been targeted by college popup advertising windows. Actually, these are the worse case scenario blogs/sites because the direct link to these blogs are ineffective. Meaning, if you go to click on the blog links the blog starts to load momentarily, then the blog gets redirected to another site, then redirected to yet another site, then redirected to yet another site. There simply is no way to view anybody's blog when you are being automatically redirected away from it by some f***ing popup advertising or some link that has made their site unable to load normally. What's worse is at this point you (the visitor) have no control of the redirections of urls you end up on. Your only solution is to close the web pages down before something nasty shows up on your computer or on the Internet - if that may be the case. Your desire to get to that other person's blog or website instantly becomes your worst nightmare.

Always remember to check if any of your widgets create popup advertising windows. If they don't that's great. If they do then delete the culprit widget, delete your entire blog template and replace it with a different template. That way those annoying redirections will disappear and people will happily visit your blog or website. But remember one thing - never do what you done in the first place that created those redirection links. Learn from it and be smart next time you want to add links to your site/blog.

Who knows how many people out there who have this problem who are also not receiving visitors because their site is targeted by links that either cause popup advertising windows or there's links on their site that redirect visitors away from their site? Unfortunately there is very little constructive help out there on the Internet to solve this problem. So I'm writing this article to make people aware that there is a solution to this problem. If you are the victim of advertising popup windows like I was then apply my solution to your blog/website and be free of them and never repeat the same mistake again.

Cross browser customizable playlist MP3 Player for your blog

Have you ever wanted to add your own mp3 files to an MP3 player that also has a playlist? Well, now you can. Are you tired of having to join a website just to get an mp3 player's code? That is no longer necessary anymore. It's all free and you just read my instructions; copy and paste; and type a bit of text. That's all there is to it and this tutorial. I stumbled across the code for this multiplayer mp3 player with a playlist by chance but it wouldn't display at first. Now it does because I got it to work properly on one of my blogs. So now you can add it to your blog and can add your own mp3 files to it. The tutorial below is easy to follow and even easier to achieve the final result. The best thing about this player is you can add as many mp3 files to it as you want - but remember to follow the instructions in this tutorial below. Once the height of 100 pixels has been reached the player will automatically create a scrollbar so you can scroll through all the mp3 files you've added, in order to play them.

The thing is, the hardest part of this tutorial is figuring out what you want to use the mp3 player for on your blog. In my case I record bird sounds on my digital camera in video format. I then upload those videos to Youtube and then convert the uploaded Youtube videos to MP3 files. I then add those MP3 files that I've saved to my computer to my Mediafire account. Finally, I'm creating a playlist of all the different sounds that each bird species makes that I've recorded. The first playlist I've made so far is of Eastern Rosella sounds that they've made throughout the course of one year. I'll be making a lot more playlists like the one above but need to convert a lot of my videos into mp3 files before I can do that.

This tutorial is entirely about adding audio mp3 file urls from your Mediafire account to the player above. The same principle should work for other mp3 files as long as they are hosted somewhere, and there is a download link available for those files. Without a download link to click on the mp3 file urls you try to add to this player (from another website other than Mediafire) may not work.

Anyway, in a 3 hour or more attempt at finding an MP3 Player for my Birds of Tenterfield blog, to help lighten the blog loading time, I mucked around with various mp3 player codes trying to add a playlist to them. Finally I got one to work, and after figuring out how to add the playlist, my attempts finally payed off. The MP3 player above is the final result.

Below is the actual code for the above MP3 player and it's playlist. It works on Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Firefox. Other browsers I'm uncertain about. Here's the code:

<center><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://flash-mp3-player.net/medias/player_mp3_multi.swf" width="500" height="100"> <param name="movie" value="http://flash-mp3-player.net/medias/player_mp3_multi.swf" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="FlashVars" value="mp3=http://205.196.120.147/2ngc03f9h2qg/d7j0b0b877dvsa8/Eastern+Rosella+14+September+2012+sounds.mp3|http://199.91.152.95/8xu9saewls3g/6cw7x739870v6wr/Eastern+Rosella+calling+for+it%5C%27s+friends.mp3|http://205.196.123.167/6ie7h4ald9cg/axkfyvgnasqe9pt/Eastern+Rosella+mimics+Bell+Miner+calls.3gp.mp3&amp;title=2012, 14 September - A lone Eastern Rosella singing a variety of calls|2012, 05 August - A lone bird calling for it's friends|2012, 01 April - Bell Miner mimicry&amp;bgcolor1=189ca8&amp;bgcolor2=085c68&amp;width=500" /> </object></center>

Customizing the player

Adding your own MP3 files from Mediafire to the player and playlist:

Let's say you have already added your own mp3 files to Mediafire to speed this tutorial up. The first thing you need to do is to find an mp3 you want to add to the player. Simply click on the title of the mp3 file in your account. A download page will appear with the file above it. Right click on the green "Download" button and select the "Copy shortcut" option. In the above code there are urls for three mp3 files. Each mp3 url is separated by a | symbol, and each url must be separated by a | symbol for it to work. Highlight the first url and paste it straight over the top of mine.

The first mp3 url is:

http://205.196.120.147/2ngc03f9h2qg/d7j0b0b877dvsa8/Eastern+Rosella+14+September+2012+sounds.mp3

After you have pasted in your first mp3 url go down to the part where I have written a description of each mp3 file. Each one starts with the number "2012" - which is in reference for the year we are currently in. Type in your own description for your first mp3 file in place of my text (which is:  2012, 14 September - A lone Eastern Rosella singing a variety of calls). At the end of that text there will be a | symbol. The | symbol is needed to separate each mp3 title in the playlist, so make sure it is always there. Repeat these steps (the last 2 paragraphs) for each new mp3 file you want to add to the mp3 player. Carefully go through the urls and text you added to make sure you did not make any mistakes.

Remember, do not add a | symbol at the end of the very last mp3 url nor at the end of the text description for it.

Adjusting the width and height of the mp3 player: To adjust the width of the player change "500" to whatever width you want. There are two instances of "width" in the code, at the top and at the bottom. Change both of them to your player's new width. At the top of the code change the height from "100" to whatever height you want. The width and height are measured in pixels!

PLEASE NOTE: On changing the width - if you add a really long title for the description of the mp3 file you added, all the text may not show up in the playlist. You will need to rewrite the description and make it shorter in length.

That's it. Once you've done all of that save your post/page and you are done. Start creating your own mp3 player's playlist today and add it to your blog. Enjoy the fun!

Some suggestions for using this mp3 player:

• Birds sounds
• Your favourite music
• Music by your favourite artist
• Podcasts in mp3 format
• Audio ebooks in mp3 format
• Make your own recordings/tutorials and turn them into mp3 files

Emoticon problem is now fixed plus other changes

I'm so glad that this problem was easy enough to fix. I just removed the script for the emoticon to show up which was in the <head> of the template and it fixed the problem. There were no instances of the actual emoticon codes in the "Expand widgets template" page at all. They had previously already been removed. So no more little emoticon surprises will show up when I add a new post that has script in it.

Whilst editing my template I also added the slide panel and comments instructions in two places so it now shows up above the comment form no matter which post you are on if you want to leave a comment on this site.

This template needs replacing ASAP

I deeply regret that I need to change the template design for this site. I will not be deleting the blog itself, just changing the way the blog looks with fresh new code. As a result I will be deleting all instances of emoticons to add to the comments, as it is interfering with the scripts I add to posts. The emoticons keep showing up in amongst code for things in posts, and it should not be happening at all.

I'll start by deleting all the emoticon code in my template but if that does not work I will replace the entire template. If that still does not get rid of the emoticons I will unfortunately have to delete this blog and start a new blog. If that should happen I will leave this blog active and have a direct link to my new blog. Sorry for the inconveniences that everyone has come across on this site.