Fed Up With Pop Up Ads

Are you fed up with waiting for popups to load just to find out if it's an advert or part of the site you are looking at?

What is a hosts file?

The hosts file sits on your computer and tells the browser where to look for certain pages. Utilizing this file is a good way of cutting down on those annoying adverts. All you have to do is add a line of code for each ad server you want to block; then your browser will look for a certain page on your computer instead of trying to load it from the net.

What to add

127.0.0.1 ad.au.doubleclick.net

Every time your computer receives a request to load a page from ad.au.doubleclick.net, instead of trying to load that page it will look for it on 127.0.0.1 -- this is your computer. When it can't find the page, your computer will load a 404 error page instead.

This will speed up your browser because it doesn't have to load the page from the net. The more of these lines you add to your hosts file the more ads you can block.

These lines will also work when an ad is in a frame on a page as well. So with some big commercial sites you will notice a speed increase loading the page, as some or all the ads will be blocked.

Where is my hosts file?

To find your hosts file just perform a search for files or folders looking for "hosts.*"

To get a list of ad servers to start you off, just go to http://liveinthemix.org/hosts.php

If you have any questions, please drop me a line alan%40liveinthemix.org or ask on thelist.

Alan Lloyd