If you’re like me, you are militant about blocking all kinds of annoying crap on the web – fly-in and popup boxes, annoying backgrounds and animated graphics, and the rest of the things designers do to “engage” users. Now I’m extremely hypocritical about this because I have also used these tools when directing designers because I know they work, so I don’t begrudge them. That doesn’t mean I have to deal with them though either, especially if it’s for a site I know I want to come back to.

Enter AdBlockPlus (for both Chrome and Firefox) – an invaluable tool for navigating the web.

One of the problems I’ve had is keeping my block lists sync’ed between laptop and desktop, and between Chrome and Firefox. Ideally, you block it in one place and have that block propagated everywhere. One way to do that is with your own custom block list.

I just created a file on one of my servers with an initial structure copying what one of the other block lists looked like. I then manually edited that list, adding in all the various elements from both my local block lists from my desktop and laptop, and from Chrome and Firefox. I recommend keeping related items together (whitelisted domains in one section, blocked DIV elements in another, etc) and sorted so that you don’t duplicate entries. I also put this file under Git so I could keep track of what’s been added or changed.

Then add that custom list to each of your ABP block lists. Any time you want to block something, you add it to the centralized custom list and it’s automatically blocked across all your ABP installs.