Getting Rid of
the GeoCities Watermark AdSquare
GeoCities, the FWP everyone loves to hate,
has officially dropped its watermark and popups for a new cash cow, called
the AdSquare. Like the evil Watermark, it is a DHTML monstrosity that uses
Cascading Style Sheets to embed a flickering Yahoo ad in the upper-right
corner of your page. Conventional Wisdom states that this ad is poised
to become even more heavily animated in the not-too-distant future, and
begin floating around the screen in much the same manner as the Watermark.
Unlike the Watermark, however, viewers will be able to remove the ad from
a single page by clicking a "close" button on the ad itself and view portions
of the page that may be underneath it.
To get rid of the ad, make
the following modifications at the end of your homepage:
...
</body>
</HTML>
<noscript><table bgColor="#ffffff"><td><font
color="#ffffff"><plaintext>
... |
Key:
Black represents your page's
existing HTML code (don't need to change it)
Blue
represents the "subversion" code to add to your page.
Red
represents the server's ad-code garbage, which you want to eliminate
using the blue code.
Green
represents something to change--change the table/text colour to match the
background of your page (for IE users)
This will tell the browser
that all the GeoCrap tacked on is meant to be viewed as text (not run as
a Javascript), and hides all this stuff in an unclosed table definition
(meaning it will be invisible to users of Netscape and other REAL browsers).
If they use IE, the AdSquare code will appear at the bottom with the same
colour as your page's background. If you use a background graphic on your
page, see below. Remember, there's no such thing as </plaintext>!
Kirk
writes in with the following code for those with a background graphic:
...
</body>
</HTML>
<noscript><table background="pic
name.jpg"><td><font color="#ffffff"><plaintext>
... |
No guarantees that it'll line
up perfectly, but your background graphic will appear at the end of the
page instead of a white square (IE users).
