Sorry for the Advertising Spam

The Arizona Republic has taken to embedding the code for their on-site advertising in the middle of sentences, sometimes in between two letters of a word.  This means that sometimes when I copy snippets from their web site, I end up with popups and spam on the blog, particularly since this stuff does not show up on the post preview, only when it goes to the site.  Sorry.

2 Comments

  1. Rogel:

    The best way to fight it is to copy first to some text editor, such as notepad, and only from their to copy to your post. This way you can get rid of many unwanted extra formating.

  2. Neolibertarian:

    Notepad is good, and MS Word lets you keep text only. When you paste, just click the clipboard button that pops up and select the formatting option keep text only. I don't even know if Word will let you transfer the code (at least without showing it immediately) since it's not a code-based editor.

    It might also be possible for you to change your blog editing system to turn off WYSIWYG and let you view the code. You could also experiment with the printer-friendly version of stories, which might not contain the code.

    Sort of an intriguing idea, though I imagine it mostly creates hassle for bloggers and annoyance for readers and that the bigger effect is an anti-theft device rather than a good source of ad revenue (who wants to buy ad space on the off-chance that a blog will copy-paste text without ever deleting the malicious code?)