There is a sickening, maddening, frustrating, irritating trend in the web for the last year or so. People are overusing “lightboxes”.

A lightbox is that effect when the screen goes kind of dark and you can only see one thing centered in the middle. It’s a modern (web 2.0?) form of modal input.

In other words, it stops you from doing what you want, in order to force you to do what the web site wants. And that, my friends, is a fundamentally evil behavior.

This particular behavior is especially overused in internet marketing: you’re trying to read a blog and then suddenly you can’t do anything until you sign up for their email list; you’re trying to read some song lyrics but suddenly your screen is hijacked by an ad for ringtones; you click a link to read an article on a news site, but before you can read it you have to sit through a commercial for Swiffer or some other bullshit.

Well fuck that. I made a browser plugin to shut off those lightboxes. Click for Firefox. Click for Chrome.

Unfortunately, because this is a non-standard behavior, there are limitless ways to create new lightbox popups and my plugin can never stop all of them, but I’m happy just to stop the most used ones, if that means an improved browsing experience for some people.

Meanwhile, if you use my plugin and you see a site with lightbox popus that aren’t blocked, please tweet me or email me or comment here and I’ll happily add support to block it in the future.

The most requested feature of my Add Linked Images To Gallery plugin has been a function to process all past posts.

I’ve finally found the time to add this feature, and published it as version 1.3. I hope this will make everyone happy. Merry Christmas.

I’ve been receiving comments lately from people asking me to update my Crossposterous plugin to use additional features from Posterous, particularly those added by version 2 of their API.

And I would love to do that.

Unfortunately, Posterous has published an incomplete API, and what they call documentation is what I call a joke.

And to add insult to injury, they’ve also removed (or hidden) all the documentation from the V1 API that I am currently using, and seems to work (most of the time).

I’ve worked in startups that were constantly rushing bad code out to production and then fixing it later, and I understand the mentality of deliver-and-iterate. If you’re going to deliver a little now and add to it later, that’s fine. It makes sense. But don’t remove something that’s working just for the sake of adding something that’s not.

And moreover, we’re talking about an API here. This isn’t a UI change that might take a moment for people to get used to later… it’s a change in functionality that requires developers to re-write and re-release software. It’s frustrating and irresponsible.