Those who argue for it will tell me that I am driving my potential customers away. Maybe, but if they leave that easily, they probably weren’t all that interested anyway. With modern browsers, someone interested in staying on my site can open the link in another tab, at their choosing. I do that all the time.

There is another school of thought on the subject. It has mainly to do with accessibility issues. While it may be obvious to you that a new window opened, it isn’t to everyone. Some people have their browsers maximized so that they can see it better. When you open a new window, they may not realize it. And so, when they try to go back using the Back button on their browser, the back button doesn’t work. Also, people with poor or no vision use readers such as JAWS to read web pages and are likely to miss the fact that an entirely new window has opened. Furthermore, they have lost the ability to use the Back button.

I’ve done a lot of research on this topic and have made the decision to make my websites accessible to as many people as possible. While I’m well aware that I could lose a visitor by not opening a new window for an external link, I’m also thinking of those who will encounter problems BECAUSE I opened a new window. So for my sites, I choose NOT to open a new window.

Most browsers make it easy to open a link in a new window, or as a tab. Someone who is truly interested in my site is likely to do this if they want to follow another link. I’m also likely to irritate a visitor by opening a new window.

If you’re interested, here are just a few places that talk about this issue:
Not opening new windows – from Dive Into Accessibility
Top 10 Mistakes of Web Design – Points 1 & 2
Strict HTML 4.01 doesn’t validate when you open links in a new window

Upon further investigation, I found that I was NOT the only one changing things. Seems that the comment count on the photo gallery was over 73,000! Ugh. And all of them are trash. They’re scums that use automated systems to advertise their websites. You know the sites, the same ones you get all the spam about. Ugh.

So first thing I did was check the settings on the gallery. I changed it so that you have to prove you’re human in order to leave a comment. You know, read the funky letters or numbers and type them in – aka Captcha. I did this for all sites that use this gallery.

Still curious. How do 73,000 comments in a database increase the disk space used by the website? Easy. They apparently create files to go along with the comments.

So how to clean it up? I don’t want all those comments out there, and they’re taking up space. Checking the gallery’s website, I find that someone, bless their heart, has created a script to clean up all the comments. It only deletes 500 at a time, so I’ve got a long way to go. But at least I’m cleaning it up.

I’m always into counting and numbering things. So, among 4 websites galleries, I had a total of 106,181 comments! And, after cleaning up the mess, I had over 700MB more space on the server. Perhaps I’ll re-look at other photo gallery programs and see if there’s one that doesn’t take up so much space or that makes it easier to turn off comments. The one I’m using is, after all Open Source, and free – so I guess it proves once again – “You get what you pay for.”

Oh, and feel free to leave comments. It makes for more interesting reading. I’ll be sure to answer!