I haven’t used ad-blockers for a very long time… partly because I haven’t used Firefox (regularly) for a long time, and I’ve been slow to adopt Chrome plugins. Also, I’m a little conflicted about denying site-owners potential income by blocking their ads. So, I’m not an expert on ad-blocking by any means, but I ran into an interesting issue with a client this week that I thought deserved sharing.
My client had chosen to use thumbnails in the Thesis teasers that were 300×250 pixels. Personally I prefer something slightly more “widescreen”, like 300x200px, but it is a food blog, so I think they’d like to show as much of the dishes as they can. We had just finished implementing the design on the website — I had written a little script that grabs the first image uploaded to the post and displays the thumbnail version of that image, if there is no Thesis Thumbnail designated for the post — and the client told me that Adblock Plus was blocking the thumbnails.
Since I don’t use ad-blockers and haven’t used this specific image size much, I’d never encountered this issue, but with the help of Perishable Press and my client we figured it out! The images have -300x250 at the end of their URL (WordPress adds the dimensions to all images it generates), and Adblock Plus was blocking images with -300x250 in their file name. 300×250 is one of the standard ad sizes… So assuming that Adblock Plus only blocks the standard ad sizes, the way to fix this issue in WordPress is to change your image size to something slightly different to 300×250, even if it is just by one or two pixels.
If you need to change all the thumbnails on your site Regenerate Thumbnails is a very effective plugin for regenerating the images after you change the size settings.
Thanks for the tip Kris! I feel the same way about denying publishers the pageviews for their ads and stuff, but sometimes it’s necessary. I usually opt for the noscript plugin in firefox instead of blocking all ads. But I try to have all my “browsing” plugins turned off while I develop stuff so that they don’t conflict with the work… I would have missed this too!
Thanks for sharing the fix too, although it’s a bummer that we have to change the dimensions on the image to overcome this.
Nice one Kristen!
As a new thesis user, I thought I’d add a bit to this post. Initially, I thought that Ad Blocker Plus was blocking 300×250 images too, as a “mock graphic” of a 300×250 Adsense unit I put up on my development site was being “blocked out” by the Ad Blocker (this was a graphic, not functioning ad code). However, I had several other photographs sized 300×250 that were showing up fine, so that made me doubt that ad size was the trigger (at least, all by itself).
Turns out the size of the graphic didn’t matter. Instead, what was causing the graphic on my site to be blocked out was the graphics file name. I initially had the file named adsense-graphic-300-250.gif. This image was blocked. Then I tried goog-sense-300-250.gif. This image was also blocked, which somewhat surprised me. Then finally I tried something totally non-ad/google related : test.a.gif. Success!
Moral of the story is if your images are being blocked, try renaming them.
Jim — Thanks for your input. I did mention in the post that the filename was the main issue. One could try renaming their images, but the issue in WordPress is when it automatically appends the image dimensions to the different sizes of the image that are generated when uploading an image.
Hey Kristen
how are you?
Kristen, have you written on your blog about blogroll? How to have it on homepage only (Thesis)? I went through the internet, and there is no clear answer.
M.
Martyna — No, I haven’t written about it specifically. Try something like the widget context plugin. Or you can add the widget manually (like at the end of this post: http://diythemes.com/thesis/rt.....ith-hooks/) and use conditional tags around the contents of the function to only put it on the home page.
Thank you, I will let you know when I figure out the code.
Kristen, the problem was solved with “Widget Logic” plugin