Ready, Reset, Go! (2006-2008)

LOL!!! Boy did Sitemeter fuck up royally.

By the way, I know I haven't been posting.
Not sure who's even around any more :(

But I saw this fiasco brewing this morning and felt like noting it.

For one thing, it may be affecting YOUR blog, if you have one. So you might want to know about it.

Sitemeter, one of the two most common web traffic counters in the world, recently made some change in their site traffic tracking code. And the result is a disaster...

From one blog that noted and tracked the issue as of Friday:

SiteMeter is bringing down every site where its counter code is loaded when the visiting browser is Internet Explorer versions 6.0 and 7.0. The error may also affect Internet Explorer 5.5.

Tens of thousands of publishers use sitemeter to track their content, including thousands of bloggers. The result: sitemeter takes down the internet? not quite.. but its pretty amazing.

And it is killing every major blog and top website out there - including sitemeter's own site!

But this is the funnier part (from the same blog I just quoted):

Status Updates

Update @ 9:00pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 9:30pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 10:00pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 10:30pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 11:00pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 11:30pm EDT: No Change.
Update @ 12:00am EDT: No Change.
(sleeping…)
Update @ 7:00am EDT: No Change. (And even we were surprised by this…)
Update @ 8:00am EDT: No Change.

I had both sitemeter and Statcounter on my site and, yes, it was crashing too. And, yeah, removing the sitemeter code from the page fixes it just fine. If you have Sitemeter on your site, remove code that is bracketed by sitemeter tags:

<!--– Site Meter –-->
...
fucked up code
...
<!--– Copyright (c)2006 Site Meter –-->

As a replacement, you can sign up with Statcounter instead and set the counter to start at whatever your current numbers are.

Anyway, they're making it far, far worse by (as of 8:40am the day after the fuckup) not fixing the fuckup and not even talking about it.

At all.

Anywhere.

Imagine being responsible for nearly every major site in the world going down on 50% of the world's computers and not saying boo for a day.

I figure sitemeter is a hobby and not a company of any sort.

Never was clear how these things made money, anyway.


Anyways, just thought it was funny how internet businesses work.

Or don't.