Saturday, August 02, 2008

There and Back Again--Sort Of

Well, I'm no longer blocked from posting. But Google must have done something in their "fix" to screw up IE. I'm doing this in Firefox, and Safari also works.

Someone suggested clearing the cache, but that can be a pain, particularly if you do it and it still doesn't work. I'll do some searching around--I know there are other Blogspot blogs this is happening to, so rather than try a local fix, I think I'll see what's happening globally first.

Anyway, expect blogging to be haphazard this weekend. My goal is to be up to full speed by Monday.

Many thanks to all of you who generously offered me assistance of all kinds--I may indeed end up taking some of you up on it as soon as I figure out the direction I want to go.

UPDATE: A cursory search as well as comments by some of you here, on the WordPress site and via emails showed the "culprit" to be the Site Meter code. I gather the folks there are doing some upgrading and didn't count on the legendary stand-offishness of Microsoft to play well with others. I removed it and IE is now working. Pity--it was more useful for quick snapshot access to BATFU visits than Stat Counter. Perhaps after they work the bugs out, I will restore the code.

UPDATE: Here's the bird's eye lowdown on Site Meter. They're doing an upgrade and it blew up in everyone's face. The thing is, I went to their site and they say nothing about this, so it's a double screw-up on their part that we have to find out from others.

My suggestion, bearing in mind that I have the computer savvy of a coral reef: Remove the code from your site (but copy it and save it somewhere). Also record the numbers so you know where to reset (this probably isn't necessary because deleting the code should not terminate your Site Meter account, which ought to have the code and last count, but I've always been a big Department of Redundancy Department fan in situations where not having backup might mean either everything I've worked for all these years is lost, lost and gone forever, I tell you, or else it's readily retrievable and restorable.

UPDATE: Bottom line, it's Bill Gates' fault.
Turns out that this was the result of a bug in Internet Explorer, which the Sitemeter developers didn't account or test for. The technical details and a description of the bug involved are here. Does this still mean that Sitemeter are to blame, or are we about to see the backlash shift to Microsoft because of a known bug and a developer not testing.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

the access problem is due to Sitemeter. Remove their bug from your page and the IE folks will no longer get the "abort" error.

opaww said...

Welcome back to the real world, good to see the site working again. Now I just need my fix on posts

Fits said...

Good on ya.

Anonymous said...

Good job getting this cleared up!
That sure was strange to have the computer freeze up going to this address during the issue with google.
It was like a big cookie was being planted, seemingly that wasn't the case but at that time it was strange, very strange.

The_Chef said...

w00t! WoG is back!

Anonymous said...

Glad your back on. I was getting ready to call my congressman.

Nicki said...

David, I've been using Statcounter for years, and I haven't had a problem. Have you tried them?

David Codrea said...

Yes, I use them too.

Welshman said...

David, glad to have you back. The whole episode yesterday was strange. Half of the websites I tried to access would not work, leaving me with an 'operation aborted' error message. And then I had my own problems with Google/Blogger, which for several hours blocked me from access to my account.

And by the way, I do not use Site Meter.

Frankly, I think the whole thing was more than just a Site Meter problem.

But, so far all is well today. We'll see.

Martyn

Anonymous said...

Gads I'm glad that problem is solved!

Warongus is one of a kind! Thanks, David, for all your hard work. :)

Kent McManigal said...

Good thing this was only a computer problem and not real life!