Monday, November 3, 2008

Wiener of the Week

What we have here isn't your run-of-the-mill garden-variety WotW. What we have here is a candidate for the Wiener of the Year. What we have here is a candidate for the Wiener Hall of Fame (coming soon!).

AOL has pulled the plug on its AOL Pictures feature, effective 12/31. Of course, if you have a website that pulls nearly all of its pictures from AOL Pictures, you discovered, to your horror, that 12/31 means 10/31 with regards to your web pages. Yes, children, let me tell you about the swell weekend I had, courtesy of A friken O-L.

Saturday I was puttering around with my little blog and discovered, to my horror, that every last picture, background, and inset I was pulling from AOL Pictures was showing as an ugly gray box with the words "Image currently not available". As you can imagine, background images with a 'repeat-x' or 'repeat-y' option (repeat along the 'x' axis or repeat along the 'y' axis of the page) were showing MULTITUDES of ugly gray 'Image currently not available' boxes all down the screen.

I scrambled on Saturday to fix all of the image issues I could so that at least the main page one sees upon stumbling upon my little blog would be presentable. Then I spent over 12 hours on Sunday cleaning up the archives and trying to see what else was broken and where.

AOL, I'm completely done with you. This is how done with you I am. Ted Leonsis is the head of AOL and the owner of the Washington Capitals, heretofore my favorite hockey team. However, in light of this blind-side assault on your customers, I am boycotting all things AOL...including the Capitals! I'm now officially a Toronto Maple Leafs fan until such time as Ted Leonsis sells the team or makes restitution for this evil that has been perpetrated on his customers.

AOL, you suck! And you're the Wiener of the Week.

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