Solved: the Intermittent CSUN Student Banner Display Problem (Dec 2007)
Comrade Cohortniks,
First, a [Merry Christmas | Happy Holiday] to you! I hope this period of peace after our classes finds you well.
Second, I found the cause of the intermittent banner display problem. This is the problem that caused some of our banners in Dr. Herr’s class not to display in some browsers. It turns out that Adblock in Firefox is blocking them! It thinks they’re ads. They are, after all, banners, so it stands to reason that they might be some noxious graphic that you’d be better without.
The blockage affected a number of student banners, including my own. It also affected the Edutech Moodle site,
http://edutech.csun.edu/edtechma/ which displayed bannerless on my machine. Since that banner contains the login screen, that was a handicap.
The screens below show how to fix it. You go into Adblock’s configuration screen and click Options. Of course you can disable it, but that sort of defeats the purpose. Upon clicking Options, you’ll get the screen shown below. What you can do is whitelist all CSUN websites. That tells Adblock to accept anything from CSUN, including our class web pages. The procedure is to tell Adblock you want to add a filter. Then you type in @@|http://www.csun.edu
The @@ tells it you’re whitelisting. The | (pipe) symbol tells it to take all subordinate web pages from CSUN.
Viola, as they say in the orchestra. You’re good to go.
I suspect this problem may happen because Adblock places a small “Block” symbol on the page near the banner graphics. If you were to click on that, it creates a new rule to block the graphic. You could clean it up by manually removing that rule, but whitelisting CSUN cleans it up all around.
One last thought: Get the Firebug debugger shown in the Add-on screen below. If you’re going to do any Web development in the future, this thing is amazing. Once you try it, you’ll be amazed how much detail you’ll discover. You can also change variables on the fly, such as CSS parameters. Instant gratification!
Cheers from the Front -- Mark Bell
