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Announcement: MAJOR Problems With SiteMeter!
By JLP | August 2, 2008
Last night I started noticing that my blog wouldn’t load properly. It would almost load and then I’d get an error message saying something the site couldn’t load and the operation was aborted. I noticed the same problem when I tried to access the SiteMeter website. I was using Internet Explorer 7 so I decided to flip over to Firefox to see if the problem existed there too. Firefox works fine!
I went over to the MoneyBlogNetwork forums and asked other bloggers if they were experiencing problems. Apparently any blog that has a Site Meter graphic is experiencing the problem. The graphic causes the blog to get hung up when loading and causes the error.
Brainy dude, Jeremy over at Generation X Finance, came up with a fix. He said that you can just move the Site Meter to the the bottom of the blog so that it loads last. I took his advice and it works!
Of course another remedy would be to just delete SiteMeter from your website—but that will mean you will lose your stats during the time that the SiteMeter isn’t present on your blog.
Sadly, there’s no message on the SiteMeter homepage about this error. It would be nice to know that they are aware of the problem and what steps they are taking to fix it.
UPDATE:
I just received the following email from Site Meter support:
We apologize for the problem this has caused on your website. We became aware of a compatibility issue with our SiteMeter tracking code and IE 7 (possibly IE 6) browsers that started 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.
If you have any additional questions please let me know.
Sincerely,
Andy
SiteMeter Support
Topics: Blogging | 6 Comments »
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
This is why I try to have very few outside data that has to be pulled in for my site to work.
August 2nd, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Thanks for the mention. I do think they have fixed the issue, since I’ve noticed sites that never fixed their code are now loading fine.
That still sucks that SM wouldn’t even post an announcement or acknowledge that a fix has been put in place.
August 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Um, nope. Issue NOT fixed. It’s 2:13 pm CST, and I still can’t get to the NYTimes using IE. At least this matter forced me to download and use Firefox, and I’m liking it lots. Thanks for the advisory; I was afraid there was something wrong with my PC.
August 2nd, 2008 at 2:26 pm
I think your issue may be unrelated. NYT is working just fine on IE, and they don’t even use sitemeter anyway.
August 2nd, 2008 at 3:56 pm
My blog is loading now, but I had the same error message earlier today and last night. FYI – I have always had sitemeter at the very bottom of my blog page – location doesnt seem to make any difference.
August 2nd, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Being at the bottom of the page, and being at the bottom of the HTML code are not one in the same. On your page, while it is at the bottom visually, it is still enclosed in blogger’s DIV tags, which is what caused the javascript to break.