Site issues: How Blog Peoria survived the Great Sitemeter Failure (UPDATED 2x)
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Internet Explorer, Sitemeter, TechCrunch on August 2, 2008 by Billy DennisSome readers might have noticed that some of your favorite blogs didn’t open properly yesterday and today.
It wasn’t a problem unique to Blog Peoria member sites. It happened all across the Internet, affecting thousands of blogs.
Here’s what happened: Sitemeter — a company that provides bloggers with statistics about visitors, page views and other details — made a change to one of their servers in anticipation of an upgrade of some sort. They made this change on a Friday.
The problem is that these change caused any blog that was using on of their Javascript buttons to fail to load in Internet Explorer 7. Some users say they were getting the same “”Operation aborted” error using IE6, too. Sitemeter workers apparently were ignorant of a well-known bug in IE.
I have always recomended readers use Firefox or some other Mozilla-based browser. But IE remains the most used Web browser. In fact, about 65 percent of my readers use some version of IE.
Because all Blog Peoria themes incorporate Site meter button, all Blog Peoria sites generated a error message. This started sometime yesterday evening at the latest, probably earlier.
As soon as I found out late yesterday evening, I sent a support ticket to Sitemeter. That ticket was answered at about 4:19 p.m. today, roughly 17 hours after I sent it.
At the time that i and virtually everyone else on the Web who uses their services, there was NO notification from the company. No emails were sent out — even though they send daily status emails — and there was no mention on their blog.
They did update their blog — after they sent out responses to what much have been hundreds to support tickets.
Too little too late though. By that time, I had gone through all the active themese and deleted the Simemeter code and replaces it with a button the fine folks at StatCounter.com. Lo and behold, I like their stats much better. Much more useful.
So here’s some advice: To Sitemter, next time to implement changes to one of your servers, don’t do it late in the workday on Friday, then send everyone home for the weekend.
To readers: Blog Peoria works soooooo much better in Firefox.
Note: A TechCrunch article on the screw-up appeared on the Washington Post Web site.
UPDATE: Here is a good description of the problem:
If a Javascript tries to append a body element to an object that is not directly embedded below <body>, but it is within an internal table or a similar hierarchy instead, the operation will fail. In other words, all Javascripts that appear inside tables and other modules are at risk.
Now compare that description to what Sitemeter told me when they responded to my support ticket:
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.
Sorry, wrong answer. I know just enough about Web site development to be dangerous. But even I am not so ignorant that I would place a code that I want to show up on my blog anywhere but inside the opening and closing “body” tags. The developer of the Mandigo theme I’m using here does in fact use tables to position the sidebars.
What’s the difference? Well, anyone who site crashed because of javascript script located outside the “body” tags has no one else to blame. A properly located third-party script that crashes a site after the think-party tinkers with it can be blamed on the third party, NOT the user.
UPDATE 2: I checked Sitemeter’s blog:
IE Users viewing pages – The error occured when the SiteMeter tag was not a direct child of the body tag (e.g. if the tag was within a table or div). [Emphasis mine] Recent changes we made created a failure for visitors viewing sites using Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6.
Than’s more accurate. But still … a developer cannot expect users to NOT use tables or “div” commands.
To reitterate: I recommend Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers because of the potential for these problems. But as long as Microsoft bundles IE7 with Windows, people are going to use it. Developers have to account for that. And there is never an excuse for breaking yoru customer’s blogs and going home for the weekend.
