Sat
Aug 2 2008
07:30 am
Sitemeter.com brain fart
By: R. Neal

More drama surfaced yesterday for bloggers using sitemeter.com to track visits and statistics.

Site Meter broke sometime over the past couple of days, causing the message "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site [site url]. Operation aborted" for anyone visiting the site using Internet Explorer. Mozilla Firefox users are not affected.

We don't use it on our *Views sites so we weren't affected, but lots of popular sites do. The only fix at the moment appears to be removing the Site Meter code from all pages/templates that include it. It will be a bunch of javascript between tags that look something like:

<!– Site Meter –>
(javascript)
<!– Copyright (c)2008 Site Meter –>

Get rid of all that and you should be good to go. Wonder how many people will put it back once Site Meter gets it fixed? Either way, it's a pretty bad PR disaster for Site Meter.

If you don't have built-in statistics tracking in your blogging software or web server, you might consider alternatives such as pMetrics (free for under 1000 daily page views) or Google Analytics (free, but not real time).

Topics:
bizgrrl's picture

Yeah. As I was researching

Submitted by bizgrrl on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 7:38am.

Yeah. As I was researching something this morning I was surprised to find I could not get to (to name a few):

TalkLeft
Crooks and Liars (update 9:15AM EST, fixed)
Atrios (update 9:15AM EST, fixed)

Lean Left
Left Wing Cracker
Sharon Cobb
Silence isn't Golden
Southern Beale
Tennessee Guerilla Women
Tennessee Politics

Once again, this is not limited to lefty bloggers. This list is just the ones I was trying to access. Instapundit had the problem and fixed it last night.

Rachel's picture

Instapundit had the problem

Submitted by Rachel on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 1:34pm.

Instapundit had the problem and fixed it last night.

Ditto Washington Monthly (Kevin Drum).

I thought for a few minutes it was my computer, but figured out fairly quickly what was happening.

lovable liberal's picture

I use Google Analytics, and

Submitted by lovable liberal on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 11:06am.

I use Google Analytics, and it's pretty good. It even updates sporadically during the day, though realtime, which I understand Wordpress provides, would be better.

Liberty and justice for all.

My home

fletch's picture

I just tried to visit the

Submitted by fletch on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 1:27pm.

I just tried to visit the homepage of Sitemeter, thinking they would have an announcement about the issue and when it would be fixed. Their homepage even aborts. How pathetic.

Justin's picture

Are there are people really

Submitted by Justin on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 1:50pm.

Are there are people still using IE? Dump it and grab one of these instead.

(link...)

(link...)

redmondkr's picture

The last time I updated my

Submitted by redmondkr on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 2:05pm.

The last time I updated my iTunes, i got a copy of Safari and played with it a bit but I am so spoiled by the luxury of Firefox with the Adblock Plus and No Script extensions that I will probably never use anything else.

There are still a few pages that refuse to cooperate and must be viewed in IE but that is becoming less troublesome.


Visit us at

The Home

Pam Strickland's picture

I use Safari, and like it

Submitted by Pam Strickland on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 2:12pm.

I use Safari, and like it very much. However, I am being more and more brainwashed by the Firefox people.

This week I started a full-time temp job that requires me to go to their office to deal with some internal software. The computer I use there only has IE. I've taken up swearing under my breath.

Pam Strickland

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." ~Kurt Vonnegut

Joe P.'s picture

SiteMeter fixed?

Submitted by Joe P. on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 3:56pm.

their web site says:

"We have become aware of a compatibility issue with our SiteMeter tracking code and IE 7 (possibly IE 6) browsers that started sometime last night.

The problem was related to some work we were doing on the backend system for our upcoming website launch.

We’ve identified and resolved two separate but related issues -

1 - IE Users viewing pages - There was a problem with users who placed their SiteMeter tracking code outside of their HTML Body Tag. Because of the changes we made this created a failure for visitors viewing sites using Internet Explorer 7.

2 - Accessing SiteMeter and Stats - Individuals trying to access or view their SiteMeter stats by clicking on their SiteMeter logo/icons were unable to gain access. This again appears to have affected only individuals using IE7.

At this time both problems have been fixed and our services are fully operational."

as for IE ... i just haven't liked it for years. i confess to a Firefox bias.

Russ's picture

The problem is fixed now,

Submitted by Russ on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 4:29pm.

The problem is fixed now, but issue 1) Joe quoted above is pure hooey. My Sitemeter code was inside the BODY tag, and my site was broken just like all those others.

Don't know what it was, but it seems to be resolved now.

~Russ

bizgrrl's picture

You must have fixed yours

Submitted by bizgrrl on Sat, 2008/08/02 - 7:33pm.

You must have fixed yours pretty quick. It wasn't getting the error when I went there earlier.

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