I have a love-hate relationship with certain websites. Sites like DailyMail or Huffington Post will often have thoughtful, articulate articles about, say, how porn is impacting kids…and there, in the sidebar, are a host of tabloid images, designed to entice you to click. At best, they’re obnoxious. At worst, pornographic.
Enter Omnomnomify It.
Omnomnomify it is best described as a joke app. Drag the button on the page into your bookmarks bar on your browser and go to a webpage with lots of images. Click the button, and the images are transformed into GIFs of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster. It’s absurd and silly, of course, but the practical implications are remarkable.
The text of each article is still intact, and that’s the important thing. But instead of looking at the latest images of celebrities bearing all, it’s now Cookie Monster wearing an apron and holding a bowl. Instead of near pornographic images in the sidebar, it’s Cookie Monster shoving his favorite food in his mouth.
It’s not a perfect app, by any means. It looks for specific file types (such as .PNG or .JPG), but since true ads are loaded through a separate type of code, they are not covered. It also appears to be contingent on how the page itself is loaded. On sites like Facebook, which load more of the page as you scroll down (as opposed to loading days of history at once), it doesn’t replace newly-loaded images with Cookie Monster.
But for those of us who simply want to read an article without being bombarded with 20 inappropriate images, it’s a step. A silly one, but a step nonetheless.
That is very cool. Can someone build a program that works like this app for my laptop?
Jim Vander Spek
overcoming-lust.com
Lisa, I love this! Amazingly funny!
An alternative is to browse with images off, and exceptions for safe websites. I have been doing this for years using Google Chrome.
How to:
Within Google Chrome, instead of entering a website address enter: chrome://settings/content This will take you to the setting page where you can select “Do not show any images.” After that every page will display without images. However, like with Cookie Monster this doesn’t take care of all adds, i.e. the ones that use flash or java, but it takes care of many. Still, you can install an extension to Chrome called adblocker or adblocker plus to take care of those extra adds.
The great thing with this setup is that you get a little icon in your address bar of an image with a red X on it, showing that images are disabled on the page you are currently viewing. With trustworthy websites, like Gmail perhaps, you can click this icon to always enable images on that page. It’s a great way to protect eyes from unexpected garbage.
Thanks for the fun alternative! It’s much more funny then just empty images :-)