[wp-hackers] Mike Little's Blog...

[Computer Guru]

I just absoloutely hate it when something so nice has a "feature" that
drives me mad.

There's a reason why AdBlock isn't built into Firefox: ads are there
for a reason.
We're all bloggers. I spend 22 hours a day writing software and
posting for my readers - all for free. I make a tiny bit of money from
the ads - enough for now.

So when a feed aggregator's "big feature" is:

/*********************************************************************\

"Advertisments be Damned"
SimplePie has limited support for stripping ads from feeds. We hate it
when people put ads in their feeds—it's so distracting when you're
trying to read.

We decided to go after some of the big guns first—Pheedo, Google
AdSense, and certain Doubleclick ads. In the future we'll definitely
expand on these efforts to the best of our abilities.
/*********************************************************************\

That's certainly not a nice thing. I mean, WTF. Just because *their*
developers have people buying them things from the Amazon wishlist and
donating money to the project, it doesn't mean that everyone else
does.

Ads on a site that makes money off you anyway (like eBay or Real or
something) are one thing, but ads on websites that devote themselves
to their readers are another.

Two minutes ago I was about to rip MagpieRSS out of my code, now
though, I'm not so sure. I can easily remove the ad-stripper (I don't
even think it blocks my FeedBurner ads), but it's a matter of
principle. Don't they get it???

-CG