This is what the Daily Mail website now looks like on my computer. Let me explain.

It’s hard to avoid the Daily Mail. Even if you’d never choose to buy a copy, links to its website are everywhere (except this post, obviously). Some are easy to spot and avoid, but when one is obfuscated by link shortening services – particularly common on Twitter, for obvious reasons – it’s all to easy to visit Mail Online unintentionally. And this is bad for two reasons: it’ll make you very angry or upset*, and it helps to bolster the newspaper’s website stats and online advert impressions.

My solution involves kittens. All the best solutions do.

Kitten Block is a Firefox extension that blocks the Daily Mail and Daily Express websites. And nothing else. There are no configuration settings, options or adjustable blacklists and no override option, so once installed it looks rather like this:

If you click on a link – shortened, full or whatever – to either site the extension intercepts it and redirects you to a special page on www.teaandkittens.co.uk, as pictured above. The extension can of course be disabled or removed. It’s free, obviously – the code that makes it tick is mostly cobbled together from snippets on the Mozilla Developer Hub site, so I take no real credit – and anyone’s welcome to edit, reuse or improve it.

Kitten Block has been tested on Firefox 3.6 under Windows, but use it at your own risk – please let me know if you spot any bugs, problems etc. You can get it from the Mozilla Addons site, here.

UPDATE: Kitten Block version 1.1 is now up on the Mozilla Addons site. It includes support for Firefox 4 Beta (up to 4.0b7), optimised code (shorter, smarter, redesigned to prevent incompatibility with other addons) and – very excitingly – a new kitten icon.

UPDATE 2: Now also available for Chrome!

* Or both, obviously.