The Sydney Morning Herald have done a site redesign. It drew a lot of negative comments, of course, but on balance I think it's not too bad. The most annoying thing, however, is the box in the right hand column that rotates through various puff piece news articles. Every five seconds or so, it changes to the next story - very distracting. It's only one step away from the dreaded BLINK tag!
Anyway, the solution is here, thanks to Greasemonkey. If you've never heard of it, Greasemonkey allows users to customise web pages through Javascript, changing things as they see fit. See also Dive Into Greasemonkey for some distilled wisdom and patterns for 'diving in' to writing your own Greasemonkey scripts.
"Rotating Puff Begone" is a Greasemonkey user script to remove the highly annoying 'rotating puff' box in the right hand column for both the SMH and The Age. It also removes ads, sponsored links and other annoyances as an added bonus.
Get it here: http://semicircular.net/rotatingpuffbegone.user.js
(And yes, if you look at the HTML source of the SMH's web page, they really have called the box "Rotating Puff". Incredible.)
I also highly recommend the use of another Firefox extension called Adblock, together with the Filterset.G which automatically keeps your browser up to date with a comprehensive list of ads to filter out.
UPDATE (November 9): It appears the SMH have realised the error of their ways and have removed the rotating puff from all of their pages, replaced instead by 'static' puff. It's tolerable, for now. Curiously, The Age still has the rotating puff.
UPDATE 2 (November 16): The rotating puff strikes back on the SMH site! This time it has "previous and next" buttons. The mind boggles as to why they thought that would be an improvement.