I finally got tired of it. I know, maybe I am just a cranky geek (maybe I should contact Dvorak), but I just got fed up with Snap.com.
They are the ones who provide a service in which mousing over a link will bring up an image of the page being linked. It used to just be obnoxious advertisements that did this now people are sticking it into their WordPress blogs. And this is wrong. I’ll give reasons:
- Pop-ups are annoying. Especially unexpected and unnecessary pop-ups.
- Someone visiting your site should not have to be constantly worried about where they are moving the mouse. Popups like that just get in the way and cause aggravation.
- If I want to see what a site looks like I will click on the link. The small image that Snap provides shows me nothing about the content. I am just not interested.
- This skews people’s traffic stats. It is just like that evil prefetching that the FasterFox plug-in is capable of doing. I don’t want to constantly be serving pages to Snap jsut to have it show up as an image somewhere.
I do have some advise for those who are sick of it as well. I just used my hosts file to block the domain that serves the activating javascript. For Windows XP go to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts and add the following line:
0.0.0.0 spa.snap.com
And for all you web masters I say “Don’t be that guy.” Really, don’t be him.
BTW, it’s set up by default on WordPress.com blogs so most non-technical bloggers don’t know they can turn it off and just think it’s a neat feature.
And interestingly, most people who I have asked and who read one of my blogs say they really like the feature.
But yes, I can see how it could get annoying…
Being default at wordpress.com would explain why it suddenly feels like it is all over the place.
I guess this shows a bit of my tech snobbery, eh?