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Ok so it's Thursday and I don't normally write this till Friday but tomorrow we may not be here.

Well that is if you believe some of the amateur weather forecasters in this part of the world. The official forecast is for the chance of a severe thunderstorm but some of the amateurs have blown that up to something approaching an icy Armageddon with hail the size of baseballs that will lay waste to the countryside.

Yeah, I'm not buying that ... but we are ordering in extra groceries just in case we get enough rain to cut the roads between us and the rest of the world. You can never be totally sure ...

Ad blocking
Now there is a subject that is guaranteed to generate some interesting responses. When you're in surfer mode who wants to have their web surfing interrupted by pop-up video ads or their page downloads stalled by overloaded ad servers?

Of course we don't! In surfer mode we love ad blockers.

Yet when we're in webmaster mode we're the ones who are stuffing our ads in every place we can get them and ad blockers are the work of the devil and we really get heated about our ads getting blocked. We'll even go so far as to suggest that the software companies that provide ad blocking software are nothing but crooks.

The President and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau suggested that one ad blocking provider is run by "an "unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes," who are engaged in "stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content, and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less -- and less diverse -- information,"

While we might agree with him and support him when he says: "This is the true face of ad blocking. It is the rich and self-righteous, who want to tell everyone else what they can and cannot read and watch and hear - - self-proclaimed libertarians whose liberty involves denying freedom to everyone else" you just know that he is going a little too far.

People want ad blocking software because we here in adult, and advertisers over in mainstream, have really gone overboard with the advertising. Advertising on the Internet may have turned out to be the equivalent of the goose that laid the golden egg but we all managed to kill it long before it produced that first shiny egg.

So now, instead of ranting from an Internet soapbox and trying to block anyone using an ad blocker, we need to be looking at ways of working around those nasty little things. We need to accept that we've done all the damage ourselves and find other ways to get our ads in front of people who really don't want to see them.

While many in mainstream are asking advertisers to reduce the amount of advertising that they throw at web surfers ... or asking surfers to turn their ad blockers off ... you know those ideas are never going to work. Even thinking about it is a waste of time so let's find a way of blocking the ad blockers.

Don't shoot yourself in the foot
I know that many webmasters in this industry pride themselves on never having to pay for anything. It there is no free version of some software or script then they either steal the paid version or do without. But working with that approach is just plain dumb.

Let me tell you a little story about a client of mine. He runs an interesting business that involves selling highly specialised training videos online. To advertise them he has put together a bunch of trailers but he's stingy, he doesn't want to pay the bandwidth for those trailers to be on his own server.

So I suggested the obvious choice ... YouTube ... but he didn't like that suggestion because he doesn't like the ads that YouTube put on the screen. Instead he chose to use Vimeo because they are free and they don't have ads ... but they do have very strict Terms of Service that my client did not read.

Vimeo certainly does provide an ad-free service for videos but that is only available for private individuals who are uploading non-commercial videos. In his rush to get something for free my client didn't bother reading Vimeo's terms but now he knows that his trailers were not within Vimeo's terms.

He knows because Vimeo deleted all his trailers and now his business has come to a grinding halt. He either finds some other free alternative, he eats humble pie and goes to YouTube or he pays. It's a decision that he has to make soon because, until he does, his cash flow has dried up.

So don't be like him; don't always pin the success of your business on the free option. Sometimes free is going to cost you a lot more that the few dollars you might have to pay for the paid option.