Evil Ad Gremlins that Steal Your Blog

A student had a problem with their blog today. For a brief second when they logged into their page, the page could be seen and then it would redirect the viewer to an ad page.

After much searching and a couple hours of work, I found that the problem was caused by a bad widget. In this case, it was something called "Zen Aquarium" . Do not ad this widget to your page and if this problem occurs the only fix is to delete gadgets (widgets)  until you delete the problem. Unfortunately this means you will have to add back the widgets you want. You need to add the Feedjit widget back for this class if you deleted it or if I had to delete it to fix the page.

Now the question I would really like answered is why any company thinks advertising by corrupting web pages is a good idea. I am thinking about starting an offenders list so that we can avoid buying the products of these companies in the future. I know that my students are less that thrilled to have to repair the damage to their pages and I am equally happy that it is now midnight and my papers are still not finished since this fix took much longer to find than I expected. Fair warning to ad gremlins; I am making a list.