Site access issues in IE7 fixed

Hi all,

Those of you whoÂ view this site using IE7 have been gettingÂ “operation aborted” errors when accessing it the last several hours (those using other browsers, like Firefox, should have had no problems with the site).Â I was getting them too and didn’t have a clue what the problem was.Â ST reader GWR sent a note last night that, according to Gateway Pundit, it had to do with Sitemeter’s java code.Â I have taken down the Sitemeter for the time being, and things seem to be working fine again. Hooray Â Sorry for the irritation and inconvenience.

FYI, I’ll be at home today “decompressing” from a very tiring week, so I will be around to catch up on some blogging today and tomorrow.Â Be back a little later this morning.

17 Responses to "Site access issues in IE7 fixed"

steveegg says:

August 2, 2008 at 9:39 am

Typical Microsoft/Sitemeter. Our friends at LGF have a couple of other fixes, besides the disabling of Sitemeter on your end or a switch to Firefox on our end, that do (or at least should) work:

– Upgrade to IE 8 Beta 1. Yes, it is a beta, yes, it only works for those running XP SP2 or later, and yes, it is somewhat buggy (I highly recommend activating the IE7 emulation), but it does squash the underlying Microsoft bug.

– Sethery has a way to send Sitemeter to the “restricted” zone and thus force IE7 (and presumably earlier) to reject the offending Sitemeter Javascript.
Sister Toldjah says:

August 2, 2008 at 9:47 am

Thanks for the info, Steve – what are some of the bugs in IE8?
steveegg says:

August 2, 2008 at 10:16 am

The main bug is the IE8-native rendering. A lot of pages (a prime example is Haloscan comments) do not render properly. That is more-or-less fixed with IE7 emulation, though Ace’s “beta” site (the new.mu.nu one) still doesn’t display quite right even with that.

The other one I found in my limited testing is the inline AutoComplete doesn’t work.

As for stat services, I’m pretty satisfied with StatCounter, which hasn’t been affected by this.

The good – it’s free, it lets you see the entire IP address (versus the obscuring of the last octet in the free version of SiteMeter), it lets you have an invisible counter for free, and it allows you to see the details of the last 500 pageloads for free (versus SM’s last 100 visitors).

The bad – it’s sometimes slow, the admin pages are not quite as user-friendly as SM, and it does not obscure any part of the IP address for visitors (which is why I don’t offer public stats). Also, my project hasn’t been converted to the SC4 standard, so I don’t get outclick info (brand-new accounts do get that).
Sister Toldjah says:

August 2, 2008 at 10:27 am

How do you do an IE7 emulation with the IE8 update? (Sorry, I don’t understand a lot of this stuff)
steveegg says:

August 2, 2008 at 10:36 am

In IE8, there is a button on the toolbar labeled “Emulate IE7” (if you’re using only icons, it’s a 7 inside a blue box). Click that so it stays highlighted, and the rendering engine will emulate IE7.
Sister Toldjah says:

August 2, 2008 at 10:45 am

Thanks, steve – I am going to try out IE8 now.
steveegg says:

August 2, 2008 at 10:51 am

The trick now is to find a site that still has SiteMeter active. Both Hot Air and Michelle Malkin took it down, but I know Badger Blog Alliance still has it up.
jim b says:

August 2, 2008 at 10:56 am

The problem is bigger. Milblogs are being attacked:

Read about it here:

LINK

Senator Obama’s Netwarriors go over to the offensive?
By The Armorer on August 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (25) | TrackBacks (2)
It would appear that just possibly, free speech isn’t a goal of the Golden Horde of Attila-the-Net-Huns that supports Senator Obama.

No, I don’t think that the campaign is sponsoring this.

But yesterday anti-Obama bloggers and Hillary bloggers who blog on websites controlled by Google started finding themselves locked out of their blogs. Well, that or there’s been a huge hiccup with Google’s system – I suppose we should allow for that, too, vice being all Chicken Little about it. But, hey, we’re bloggers!
steveegg says:

August 2, 2008 at 10:57 am

William Teach just put up another temporary fix that allows SiteMeter to stay up and IE7/6/5.5 to see the site – use the HTML code instead of the JavaScript one.
steveegg says:

August 2, 2008 at 11:00 am

Noted that, Jim. I also found claims (and evidence) from a couple of prominent local lefties that they’re also victims of the Google/Blogger splog glitch.
Sister Toldjah says:

August 2, 2008 at 11:35 am

steve, I just went back to IE7. Gonna wait a little while on IE8.
steveegg says:

August 2, 2008 at 11:51 am

Understandable. Betas are not for everybody.
T-Steel says:

August 2, 2008 at 12:29 pm

Brought us down over at The Moderate Voice as well. The whole “roll out the big change and OOPS” mentality with many web software (software in general) “companies” is tiresome.
Sister Toldjah says:

August 2, 2008 at 1:11 pm

steve – IIRC, I actually did download the beta of IE7 and liked it so much I decided to keep it. Even with the “emulate IE7” button on 8, it was still buggy for me.
steveegg says:

August 2, 2008 at 8:53 pm

The latest word from Sitemeter is they fixed it.
Great White Rat says:

August 2, 2008 at 10:05 pm

Steve, that seems to be confirmed. I removed Sitemeter from my restricted zone and this page loads correctly now.
Jerry says:

August 3, 2008 at 1:36 am

I have Sitemeter on my blog, but didn’t have any problems with it crashing anyone’s browser…

… primarily because no one ever goes there.

Comments are closed.