Alvin’s Weblog

I have always been a pretty objective person in whatever I do. I see things objectively before making my decisions. One such situation where I was pretty objective was in choosing which blog advertising to use. When it first started off, there was really only 2 local companies going against each other. Who? In case you still haven’t noticed, it’s Advertlets and Nuffnang. No, I am not linking to Advertlets because their website is down and has either been taken hostile or they just didn’t bother to renew their domain.

When both first started operations, I was objective and gave them both spaces on my blog. Unlike some people who are pro Nuffnang or pro Advertlets, I gave them both a try. I don’t see why either is better than the other. The only way we can judge is by the advertisement contents. Then again, I am not there everyday to monitor their campaigns and I cannot say for sure.

Then, I was checking my blog yesterday and I kept getting redirected to another page. Before that, I was checking Advertlets and I found it strange as I didn’t get to the page I normally would be going to. My blog loaded and then redirected when the adverts were loading. The culprit here is Advertlets. I removed their codes and after that, it was fine.

Now, being a guy in the IT industry and having a website of my own, a website that is not accessible is bad enough. Having a website that is now redirected to another website is worse. Having a javascript that redirects OTHER PEOPLE’S website is just off limits, intentional or not. The damage has been done, but the worse thing a webmaster can do is to not rectify the website within hours and getting it where it is.

Then again, it might not be the webmaster’s fault. The problem with having an expired domain is that it might be redirected to a parked page. Now, even when renewed and redirected to the original page, people still see the parked page, at least not until all name servers have been updated.

My blog is one of those that got redirected to another website because of Advertlets. No one will be happy about it when people come to their site for a visit but is brought to another site. I have concluded that I’ll strip Advertlets off my site for good. Failing to load ads is fine with me, but redirecting my readers to another advert site is a big NO NO.

My readers will then think the followings:

1) Alvin’s Weblog is gone.

2) Someone hacked Alvin’s Weblog.

The damage is done. So no more Advertlets for me. Nuffnang is my only local advertisement content provider. They have recently introduced a loyalty program called Nuffnang Glitterati. Their crawlers better not exclude me, because I am exclusive!