Misc

The Internet Died - Thanks Sitemeter

Now Wuup does not use Sitemeter, however a lot of people do, including people I work for, infact thousands of websites do, as sitemeter boast a free service for which you can use to track visitors to your website, in exchange for scripting which links back to them, fair enough I thought.

However, this is what happend, any visitors using internet explorer, most versions, including IE7, would have recieved an error message, which is great for the user experience - or maybe not. This does however raise the fact of how reliable is site meter, or anyone? - I have noticed sitemeter having problems in internet explorer a few months ago, so its at least twice this year I’ve seen problems, especially if you have a pre-installed spyware-ready dell pc, or other mainstream manufacturer which edit’s the registry for your browser. What happend was, sitemeter had a problem, and caused the page to fail to load, redirecting by the custom search error page provided by dell, or who ever.

The only solution until sitemeter fixed the problem, some 3 days later - Saturday afternoon GMT, was to remove the site meter code, apparently the fault was also fixed by removing it from any div, or table container, and making sure it was directly into the body, however for those who want to make it some what pretty, we dont want it aligned to the left, - sticking out like a sore thumb, but to make it work, I guess it has to be done - the other solution was removal, though not an option for large static sites really.

So really this comes down to what can you do to avoid this sort of situation - and the honest answer is not a lot. If you have a common footer, using an include like php, or asp. Then this is the best option to remove it, or even consider a paid service with some kind of service contract and garantee - My preferred, is Google Analytics, as this has never failed or caused problems for the last year and a half I’ve used it - the service is excellent, and the data provided is detailed - an option, but be sure to read the terms and conditions, as they do charge for very very large websites - unless you couple it with an adwords account with substantial usage.

The other option of course, and I assume is the most reliable, is to use one by your hosting provider, they often come with some kind of tracking in the likes of cpanel, or other similar control panels. These track your package via the web server itself, requiring usually no installation process at all - good old apache, we love you.

If I was a sitemeter user, which I am not (I used briefly before converting to Google Analytics), I would seriously consider a move - as sitemeter seems to be struggling to provide a service, free or not, certainly think twice - EVEN with their paid service, which works on the same technology anyway, just more statistics.

According to w3c, 40% of people use firefox (which I find difficult to believe, as most users don’t actually know what a browser is) - and pretty much the rest is internet explorer, a very small percentage use safari or others like opera.

Many thanks

Wuup Team

Related Wuup Stuff:

• 7 October, 2008 -- Round Up of Technology News This Week

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