Damn Smiley’s

This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

If you visited my site yesterday, you probably would have noticed a conspicuous loss of the left hand menu. This is what happened

While I know it’s really not a great browser, I do tend to use the MS Internet Explorer as my browser of preference when surfing the web. One of MSIE’s great failings is a lack of built in popup blocking, so as a result I also have the googlebar plugin added. As well as popup blocking, it also has a very handy page ranking thing on it.. but that is another story.

It was to my surprise that several days ago I got a popup blocked message from this very site. When it happened again the next day I decided to let the googlebar allow popup’s from this site. After several reloads later I got an ad for smiley’s.
SMILEY’S for fuck sake.

Now I make no bones about my distain for those god awful little graphics. I don’t have a problem with an ascii smiley :) and I tolerate the ones that launch up on my MSN but I can’t understand why anyone would need 1.2 million different emoticons to add to their email.

So, not only did I have an unexpected popup, making me think it was time to do a scan for spywear, but it was for the one thing that really irk’s me. Right clicking and getting the properties pointed the finger squarely back at bravenet who I had been using for quite a while to monitor site statistics, and although I had found a couple of better stats services, I continued to keep the counter there for “evaluation” purposes.

Not any more!

This site is hosted by Arachnet and is essentially posted on my “free” webspace. You know the deal, you get your internet access and they also give you an email account and some webspace.. Well, the amount provided for personal use is 20mb, and four years of posting photographs meant I was using 21mb of that 20 and .. yadda yadda.. When I uploaded the modified menu, not only was it blocked by an “over quota” message, but it replaced the menu file with a 0 byte file .. hence.. no menu.

No menu also meant no stats. So now I have an unusual dip in my visitors graph (I had 130 page loads last Friday from 89 different visitors.. Today I had 1 page load from 1 visitor – Me!)

Thankfully, this should be fixed today. Arachnet have agreed to give me another 10mb of disk space and I have taken down some of the non member images to get the menu working again. I just have to remember to put them up again later.


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