gregdoolittle.com

Victory is mine.

After spending quite some time on the phone with GoDaddy.com’s customer service reps, complaining about what I thought was a mistake on their part, I realized I had not read every word in the fine print.

It all started when they sent me yet another a promotional email last week; the subject was: “Exclusive Savings - .COM just $6.95/year”, and the fine print said something about a free web-hosting package if you signed up this weekend, valued at $96.00. Since I had known GoDaddy to occasionally have absurd offers for web hosting packages, I thought: sure, this will be a good opportunity to start that website I’ve been thinking about. So I registered for the site.

I designed a logo on my desktop with CSS (as opposed to in photoshop), this way the file size would be much smaller. I felt so smug. A few hours after registering, I uploaded my logo to my new site (www.cssfoundry.com). I always get a little thrill out of seeing my stuff through an http request, as opposed to from my desktop, so of course I looked at my site. typed the URL into the browser, and WTF DO I SEE? THERE’S ADS FOR GODADDY ON MY PAGE!!!!! all across the top of the page about 100 pixels in height, there are ads for go daddy! How did these get here? They weren’t in my code, and I sure as heck didn’t sign up for them. I signed up for hosting that was worth $96.00, not some crummy free geocities, or aol sponsored site. I mean, I paid money to have the site! You can imagine how ripped-off, and how stupid I felt when the guy on the phone said that the free hosting was supposed to be free “ad-supported” hosting. How that could be worth $96.00 is beyond me. Faulty advertising at its best, I thought. Oh well, I’ll have to switch hosts….

…but wait! I just thought of something. Why don’t I just cover their ads with a div element? This way, the ads would not be visible; people would only see the div element layered on top of the ads. The ads wouldn’t even be clickable. It was such a great plan, because GoDaddy wouldn’t get to make money off of my site, and my visitors wouldn’t be bothered with their ads. So that’s what I did. GoDaddy tried to scam me, and I beat them, here is the CSS:

#GoDaddyTriedToScamMeAndIBeatThem {
	position: absolute;
	top:0px;
	width: 100%;
	height: 101px;
	background-color: inherit;
}

and the corresponding html, of course:

<div id="GoDaddyTriedToScamMeAndIBeatThem"></div>

What a satisfying feeling… I just hope they don’t catch on to me. At least for the time-being, I can say that I won. My little way of “sticking it to the man”.
;)