Sites Crashing: Fact or Fiction?

Many bloggers are buzzing about with news about sites crashing from the use of Sitemeter. This occurrence of non viewable sites came to my attention yesterday from my friend Wendy. Her and I have worked on sites for a number of years and she could not view AGM in her IE7, however I could view it in Mozilla Firefox.

This morning I awoke to an urgent message about IE7 and Sitemeter ‘crashing sites’. Millions of bloggers were removing their Sitemeters frantically fearing loss of information on their sites.

Upon further investigation I found that this information didn’t add up. Sitemeter had no messages in their news or support rooms, yet why are so many bloggers spreading this news like wild fire?

I went to AGM and tried to view it in IE7 and it was fine this morning. For cautionary reasons of this rumor we removed the Sitemeter from AGM and GGM just in case. Then I continued to search the net for more info.

At Techie-Buzz they said that,

“we suspect the “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” error being to one of the add-ons he is using. You can try to load Internet Explorer without any add-ons and then try to perform the same action, if everything goes fine you will have to enable each add-on one by one to find the faulty add-in that is causing the issue.”

They linked us to Microsoft’s page about this mysterious message and found that it may be remedied by following their troubleshooting instructions. There is a thought about this all being due to the JavaScript and you can read more about that in these links I am providing.

So before we continue to spread news of sites actually ‘crashing’ we need to first check out all other possibilities. It’s been known that IE7 has had several issues over the last year, which is why I prefer Mozilla Firefox.

Again, my site at AGM did not crash, although one of our readers could not view our sites yesterday in IE7. If you are concerned about your site not being viewable and you feel it’s due to Sitemeter, you can use their HTML code to track your hits until more information is available. You won’t be able to track where your hits are coming from, but at least your hit count service won’t be interrupted.

I sent in a request to Snopes about this rumor and am awaiting further information. I have no doubt millions of people are doing all they can to find out the truth of this and we should know more shortly.

So if you could not view AGM or GGM we apologize for the inconvenience. I admonish you to use Mozilla Firefox, it works far better than IE. ;O)

Now please do take some time to enjoy our August Issue of GGM.