Well, I tried everything I could to get Sitemeter to work properly, but to no avail. I emailed Sitemeter about it and they are refusing to even answer me and a number of other techies who have made inquiries about the problem. Their web site and tech blog do not even contain an acknowledgement of the problem. I really detest denial. So, like so many others including Volokh, Xavier, Blogonomicon, et al., I removed Sitemeter from my blog. That’s kind of a drag because I have always really liked their tracking, and I haven’t found anything else that works quite as well, but if they are going to use questionable Javascript and then not respond to the concerns of their users, then they have to go.
Then, I got to surfing on other blogs that were dealing with the problem, and guess what? Sitemeter fixed the problem. I reinstalled the code and tested it with IE7 and the problem has gone away.
This is a major FUBAR for Sitemeter and I bet a lot of people who pulled if off of their blogs won’t put it back on again. I guess the moral of that story is to test your “upgrades” before you inflict them on your customers.
Update: Sitemeter did respond to my inquiry, so in the interest of fairness and considering that I sort of skewered them, here’s the e-mail:
Dear Syd,
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