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 [1] (free for under 1000 daily page views) or Google Analytics [2] (free, but not real time).