Operation aborted?
There are lots of free tools available these days for creating and enhancing web sites- I rely on a number of them every day. This blog uses WordPress, for example, while postalnews.com uses Google’s Blogger. Google also provides my email, and for some time now, I’ve used Firefox as my web browser. Using Firefox is what caused me to be blissfully unaware of the fact that a number of users were unable to view my sites yesterday afternoon.
Another free tool I (formerly) used, Sitemeter, a hit-counting service, upgraded some of its scripts yesterday but apparently failed to check them out carefully enough. And then, I’m guessing, Sitemeter hopped in its car and took off for the weekend. Meanwhile, web sites across the country started dropping like flies.
I didn’t find out about it until a reader emailed me to let me know- after all, the site was loading just fine in Firefox. The folks at Sitemeter were apparently still in the dark about the problem, because their own web site was producing the same “operation aborted” error message that their product was causing on mine. When I checked their site using Firefox, I could find no mention of any problems.
According to The Reference Frame, the culprit was actually a known bug in Internet Explorer 7. If you use a newer or older version of IE, or better yet, Firefox or Safari, there’s no problem. Sitemeter’s statistics tell me that 54% of postalnews.com’s readers use IE7, though, so I didn’t have any choice but to remove the code from the site.
The fact that the bug is actually a Microsoft error mitigates Sitemeter’s guilt a bit I suppose. But even so, it’s hard to believe that they’d change code without (apparently) testing it out thoroughly with the browser that, like it or not, still has the lion’s share of the market! (And how could they not know that their own site was dead for 18 hours?) I guess the bottom line is that despite all the state of the art free tools available, there’s still some truth to the old saying “you get what you pay for”!
