Avian’s Blog

I remember reading somewhere that the English word free when used on the Internet is without meaning. It has become part of the background noise of the language and doesn't carry any information. If something is said to be free, it can mean that it's either free as in freedom, free as in beer, free as in we-will-force-you-to-watch-a-ton-of-ads or free as in give-us-your-credit-card-number-first.

I've just experienced this ambiguity: A certain apartment in Italy was advertised to have wireless LAN for internet hook-up included in the price. Wireless LAN was indeed free of charge, external internet connection not so much at 5€ per hour.

This is one customer that won't be returning there next year.

Last Friday Zemanta released a new version of the browser plug-in that gives you image and link suggestions when writing blog posts. One of the new features is also integration with Google's Gmail. So in addition to blog posts, you can now also add suggested images and links to your mail.

I hear that some don't like this new feature. While I don't trust my personal mail to Google, I do like my Inbox clear of fancy HTML mail and strictly stick to sending plain-text messages. So I can understand the complaints.

Here's a completely unofficial will-void-your-warranty guide to removing Zemanta from GMail while keeping it for blog posts. Note that you will need to be able to upload a file to a web server somewhere on the Internet (if you have a blog, this shouldn't be a problem. If not, what are you then using Zemanta for?). Following steps work for the Firefox version of the plug-in only.

First, enter about:config in your location bar. Click through the fancy Mozilla warning if it appears and enter zemanta.rules in the filter box.

The default setting should be something like http://static.zemanta.com/firefox/rules.xml. Copy this address and download the XML file to your machine.

Open rules.xml in a text editor and find the part that looks like this:

<rule>
<name>Gmail</name>
<regexp>https?://mail\.google\.com/mail/.*</regexp>
<regexp>https?://mail\.google\.com/a/.*</regexp>
<url>
http://static.zemanta.com/widgets/google/gmail/loader.js
</url>
</rule>

Comment it out. (put it in an XML comment block <!-- ... -->)

Now save the changes and upload it to your webserver. The location isn't important. Just check that you can access it by entering it's URL in your browser's location bar.

Go to about:config again and change the extensions.zemanta.rules setting to the URL of your modified file.

(in case you're tempted to simply enter the file:///... URL of the file on your hard disk: it won't work - you need a genuine web server.)

Restart your browser and if you've done everything correctly Zemanta should no longer show up on your Gmail page.

A couple of warnings in the end: since you made a copy of that file, you will now have to keep it updated yourself when it changes on Zemanta's server (i.e. at the next plugin upgrade if not sooner - there's probably a reason this is not shipped with the plug-in). Remember, you can always get the default value of the setting back by right clicking on it on the about:config page and choosing Reset.