Please, Make It Stop

Do you know what I hate?  I hate visiting a web page and having a video automatically play in my web browser.  Even worse, I hate being greeted by a loud, overenthusiastic pitch man shilling some insane deal.  In case you haven’t caught on quite yet, I am talking about the homepage of tnawrestling.com, a page I almost quit returning to until I took matters into my own hands.

Everyone who goes to tnawrestling.com knows that a video automatically plays when the homepage loads.  This is true even if you stop the video, click on a link to go to another page and then return to the homepage once again.  Quite annoying, isn’t it.  Well, it won’t be any longer.

Sure, you can either disable Adobe Flash or turn down the volume on the speakers, but I have got one better.  You see, if you click on one of the tabs above the video, like TNAU TV, the video won’t autoplay anymore.  Even if you go to another page and then return to the homepage, the tab you chose will be selected and the video will not start.  We finally have some peace and quiet, of course, that is until you close your browser window.

If you don’t mind using that little nugget of knowledge each and every time you visit their homepage, then go ahead and use this option.  I, however, wasn’t quite satisfied with always having to change the video tab and decided to look at some more options.  Using my background as a professional web developer, I was able to solve the problem.

Now, when you click on one of the video tabs, a session cookie is set, which tells the browser which one was selected so that when you return to the page, it knows which tab to show.  The problem with session cookies, though, is that it expires whenever you close the browser window.  Wouldn’t it be great if it never expired?

If you use Mozilla Firefox with a particular add-on, you can achieve just that.  The add-on is called Add n Edit Cookies and it works with Firefox versions 1.0-3.0 and it only takes about five seconds to install.  After it is installed, just follow these simple instructions and you will never have to hear those annoying videos ever again.

Step 1: Set the Cookie
Go to tnawrestling.com and click on one of the tabs, such as TNAU TV.  Doing this will set the session cookie on your computer.

Step 2: Open the Add n Edit Cookie Window
Click on Tools at the top navigation bar and select Cookie Editor.  This will open up the Add n Edit Cookies window.

Step 3: Find the Cookie
At the very top you will see an input box in which you can use to narrow down you cookies.  Type in tnawrestling.com and you will see several cookies in the window below that their web site sets on your computer.  The one cookie you need to look for is called videos_tabsjwts_tabcookie.

Step 4: Change the Expiration Date
Highlight that cookie and click on the Edit button to change the properties that go along with that cookie.  At the bottom of the edit screen, you will see an Expires radio button option.  Check the New Expiration Date option and enter in a new expiration date.  For mine, I changed the year to 2038, which means the cookie will not expire until 30 years from today.

Step 5: Save the Changes
Once it is changed, click on the Save button and enjoy the peace and quiet on the tnawrestling.com homepage.

The only way that this should change is if your cookies are changed or deleted or if you get a new computer, whichever comes first.  If the video does start to autoplay once again, just follow these five easy steps to make it stop.

I hope everyone finds this useful as I did.  It truly is a lot better now visiting their web site and not having to turn off their video.  Aside from testing out code, I don’t use any other web browsers, so if you have your own tips for Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Safari or any of the other browsers, feel free to either leave them in the comments or email me at starman@inlinefusion.com and I will post them to the site.