This starts with pretty basic annoyances, blinking text for instance or background music which are thankfully more or less a thing of the past. It goes one with annoyances that many modern websites have, exit popups, tracking cookies, articles that are split into multiple pages to increase pageviews or links that use a custom color to make them harder to detect.

Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances is a collection of web browser bookmarklets to get rid of specific annoyances. Bookmarklets are small programs that affect (for instance change, add or remove features) the active website when they are executed.

The website lists 20 bookmarklets along with descriptions of what they do and in which browser they can be used in. The website itself appears to be relatively old since it lists Netscape as one of the browsers and not Google Chrome or Safari. Chance is however high that the scripts will work in all modern web browsers.

The bookmarklets need to be dragged and dropped to the browser’s bookmark’s toolbar or a folder of the bookmarks.

Probably the most interesting from today’s point of view are the following bookmarklets:

• zap images – replaces all images on the website with its alternate text.
• printer friendly – tries to find and load a printer friendly version of the page
• restore context menu – re-enables the context menu if a page has blocked access to it
• zap cookies – removes cookies that have been added by the website

I have tested several of the bookmarklets and they all worked flawlessly. Interested users find all 20 over at Squarefree.

His post got me thinking about aspects of tech blogs that I dislike and I came up with enough stuff to make my own /diggworthy/ list. Interestingly enough that is also number one on my list..

1. Writing For Digg or Other Social Networks

The 10, Top 20, The Best.. Many articles that are written to make the Digg crowd digg the article. They seem to love top lists. And yes, I’m very well aware of the irony that this post is one.. Many people love those posts but I have to say that I avoid them at all costs unless they are special. Consider that before writing about the Top 10 Firefox extensions everyone should use or the Top 50 iPhone applications for iPhone owners.

2. It is English

My English is not perfect and I get regularly bashed in the comments because of mistakes I make. But, there are some blogs out there that are really hard to understand because of the grammatical structure and choice of words. If I read something and have to guess what the author meant because of the grammar then it is game over for that blog. Unless it is really unique.

3. Repetition

Seeing articles about the same news story that originated from one source on dozens of tech blogs is something that makes me click the Delete button in rapid succession. I do not want to read about it if all that you are doing is repeating what the source already wrote. Adding information or opinion is required to keep my fingers from itching.

4. Not Linking To The Source

There are actually two aspects that annoy me here. The first is when a blog is not linking to the source it got the news from. One rule of journalism and scientific writing is to always mention the source. If you do not mention it you land in the trashcan. Yes, many respected online magazines do not like to link to (or only sparsely) other websites.

Some sites on the other hand link directly to a file that they reviewed instead of the developers homepage. That’s a no-no

5. Blogs That Are Not offering Full Feeds

Offering only partial feeds might be a way to get a little bit of traffic from visitors who read the first paragraph of an article in their feed reader. It will on the other hand annoy many tech savvy users who do not have the time to visit hundreds of websites each day to read all the articles that they could not in their feed reader. If an article is interesting enough the readers will come because they might be interested in the comments as well.

6. Advertising Instead Of Reviewing

Some companies like to buy reviews to get backlinks and exposure on the Internet. This would not be a problem if the author of the article would disclose that fact. Sometimes they do not. If it is to obvious the blog will be deleted from the feed reader.

7. Writing Unrelated Articles

Stick with the tech stuff if you run a tech blog. I’m usually not interesting in reading stories about stuff that is not tech related. If it happens occasionally that’s fine but if it’s a regular thing I’m gone.

8. Internal Linking

Linking internally can be a great way to provide readers with additional information about a certain aspect of an article. Some websites overdo it on the other hand and always link certain keywords to certain pages on their website even if the information is not related at all.

9. Dividing articles on pages

Dividing a top 10 list on ten pages might increase the pageviews tremendously. It will however annoy the hell out of many readers who have to use the print feature to read the full article on one page. It gets complicated if these sites do not offer full feeds or a print option.

10. Filling a Top List To Make It Look Better

People digg top 10 lists but they might not like your fabulous top 17 list. That’s why you have decided to fill it with three not so fabulous entries to be able to post a top 20 list. And yes, this is another excellent example of a filler..

Your turn. Got anything to add? Let us know in the comments.