A while back we had a bug where only visitors to the blog using Firefox could visit Life in the Great Midwest. This bug was caused by Site Meter, a program that we use to track the number of visits and what referrals are to this blog.
There are a couple of ways to use site meter - there is the "free" version where you can see it on the sidebar of your blog and it saves limited information and the "full" version where it saves more information and also shows search words and other items that are interesting. Of course, since we don't advertise on the site, it doesn't really matter what our traffic is anyways, but it is good to find other sites linking to us, for example (which explains when we get a surge of comments).
We pay for the full version (about $7 / month - Dan is too stubborn to pay for this crappy tool so I did it instead) and it is always having trouble. On Sunday I tried to log in and this was the response that I received (the photo above).
How can they be such a mistake-prone company? Their only product is a web analytics tool and for some reason or another they don't test it before release. It's not like they are too busy doing other stuff back there? Oh well, at least they didn't block visitors to the site.
Here is a term that you can use site meter -
QUALITY ASSURANCE. I even linked to the wikipedia definition, just in case you haven't heard of it.
4 comments:
Give google analytics a try. It's free and my have enough features for what you need.
I used Google analytics over at midas oracle - it is pretty cool.
Guys, I ran into the same problem this weekend (at least I don't pay for it I guess...) Anyway, you're right. Huge foul on them to introduce something completely new without thoroughly testing it. Shit, I even test out new templates on something other than my Snakesite before I bring them on over. Unsat....
I stopped using SM after two separate periods when it would hang up page loads on our blog. (I suspect this problem also occurred in the past and I didn't then realize that Sitemeter was to blame.) I use Google Analytics, which gives very good after-the-fact stats but doesn't provide info on current traffic. SM was useful to find out quickly if another site had linked to us. Is there a good replacement for this function?
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