I’m a big fan of GlimmerBlocker, an ad-blocking proxy that works beautifully to block ads & annoying JavaScripts, fix issues on various sites, & in general make web browsing far more pleasant. The best thing about it is that it’s a proxy, so that means two things: it works with all my web browsers (you just tell them to use your Mac’s Network proxy settings), & I only have one set of rules to edit & update, instead of a separate set of filters for every different browser’s ad-block extension. Convenient!

The one problem: how the hell do you export & import your own filters, the ones you create yourself, not the ones to which you subscribed (obviously, you can just resubscribe to those)? I just upgraded to a MacBook Pro with Retina display, but I still had the filters on my old Mac. Nowhere on the GlimmerBlocker site do they explain how to export & import. Finally, thanks to a single forum post by “B-G”, I figured it out.

  1. On your old machine, with the filters you want to export, open GlimmerBlocker & select your filters in the Filters box.
  2. Click in the Rules box.
  3. Press Command+A to select all.
  4. Drag the selected rules to your Desktop, which will create a file named something like <?xml version="1.0" encoding.textClipping.
  5. Transfer that textClipping to your new machine.
  6. On your new machine, open GlimmerBlocker & create a new filter. Give it a name.
  7. Drag the textClipping file into the Rules box. Your filters should appear.

That’s it. It’s easy, but it’s also completely non-obvious. It’d be nice if GlimmerBlocker documented this so I didn’t have to.