August 02, 2008

Sitemeter goes haywire - crashes Internet Explorer

Last evening, my wife and I began to notice that we were not able to access many of our favorite blog sites. My wife was the first to notice and she thought that our wifi was messed up somehow. But after poking around a bit, we realized that we were able to access many web site, but my blog was not working and we could not access Sitemeter.com.

I eventually switched to my Opera browser and my wife switched to Firefox and since we had not problems after that, we forgot about it until this morning. Once again, this morning, we were not able to access many sites (mostly blogs) that we frequent until we switched to our non-IE browsers.

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I Googled the problem and came up with this site, which seems to have been the first to notice the problem and figure out what was causing it.

This site says that they realized that their Sitemeter tracking code was causing the site to be unavailable in certain recent versions of Internet Explorer. I removed my Sitemeter tracking code from my site and it immediately began to work again in Internet Explorer.

So ... I apologize if you were trying to access my site last night or early this morning and were not able to do so. I have fixed the problem for now, but would like to regain the functionality of Sitemeter sometime soon. Hopefully Sitemeter will correct this issue in the near future.

If you're using Sitemeter on your blog, apparently you can switch the code to the non-javascript code (HTML code) and get around the problem, but you won't be able to see the page from which the visitor accessed your site.

Update - Aug. 2, 2008 - 2:30 PM Apparently Sitemeter has fixed the bug and the sites seem to be working again. Sheesh! I'm glad that's over.

Addendum - Aug. 2, 2008 - 10:47 PM There are heroes in the blogosphere. Lumo has explained the problem and provided multiple IE/Sitemeter crash fixes.

2 comments:

  1. An explanation of the problem and eight workarounds or fixes: IE Sitemeter crashes

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks lumo - You're the hero of the hour. I'm going to post an addendum directing people to your explanation and workaround.

    ReplyDelete

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