Redesigning a web site, especially one with as many eyeballs as CBC.ca gets, isn’t easy. You’ll never please all the people all the time. And while most reviews of the latest redesign have been positive, one bone of contention heard is about the weather-box in the upper-left corner. Presumably the designers wanted something there to balance out the ad.

Now, an anonymous Vancouver programmer (not me!) has developed a tool to remove it from the site — well, to remove your ability to see it.

Some people using the Firefox web browser can download an extension to block advertising which, on the CBC site, makes the weather box hang in mid-air taking up valuable screen real estate.

The weather-box blocker is being promoted in Usenet newsgroups and on the popular social-news web site Digg.com.

In case you’ve missed it, CBC Radio is using a new series of taglines to promote its regional programming. But the phrases like Totally Toronto and Very Vancouver aren’t ringing well with some people. (Montreal bucks the alliteration trend with So Montreal. I guess Mostly Montreal wasn’t quite right.)

On this blog, the taglines have received a bit of heat from listeners:

I have a problem with CBC Montreal always using that nauseating phrase, “So Montreal.” The word “Montreal” is not an adjective. I wish they would stop using it as such.

After a week of “Totally Toronto” and I want to take a hammer to my radio and smash it! Like, that’s so, like, really annoying to, like, listen to all the time! Like totally!!

Wow, I feel sorry for you Toronto people. I thought “So Montreal” was annoying. “Totally Toronto” is not only using a noun as an adjective, it’s unnecessarily alliterative too! I imagine it must be totally annoying to keep hearing that phrase. Why don’t they just come up with original (and grammatically correct) slogans for the different CBC regional stations?

A letter to the Hamilton Spectator newspaper says:

For the last 10 days CBC Radio 1 from Toronto has been constantly playing the tag line “Totally Toronto.” If CBC Radio 1 out of Toronto is “Totally Toronto” it clearly has nothing to do with the Greater Hamilton area.

Hmmm… good point.

(There are worse taglines, for the record. When I was a 20-year-old reporter for KBS Radio in the Kootenays, the network’s tagline was “It’s great to be in the Kootenays.” We had to say that every time we answered the phone.)

So, if you were picking a tagline for your own local CBC station, what would it say?