The smh.com.au website has an annoying habit of putting videos at the top of their “news” articles. That is: 15 seconds ads appear on many of the pages followed by the news story. The only way to avoid the ad is to locate and hit the “Don’t Play” button within 5 seconds.
Drives me nuts. So I got proactive and knocked up a little chrome extension to simply remove the video altogether. If you have Chrome, click on this, say “yes, I trust you John” and you can read the latest “news” annoyance free.
http://programmerforhire.com.au/dontplay.crx
Tested only on Chrome v11.0.696.65 beta-m
The five websites it applies to are:
- smh.com.au
- theage.com.au
- watoday.com.au
- brisbanetimes.com.au
- businessday.com.au
The code inside is really simple…
$(document).ready(function(){
$('#video-player-content').empty()
})
If I get excited one night I’ll bother to narrow it down to just reversing the playing functionality – so that we still have the option of watching the ad/story if we choose.
