For those of you ourt there that use SiteMeter, I need some verification that the service is unreachable right now. The icon does not load on my Blog page (you may have noticed this if you are reading this is a browser) and when you do get to the site, the stats database is unreachable.

Wouldn’t bother me much, except I am a paying subscriber of this service. And companies who offer for-pay services to this community should read Mary Hodder’s rant on lost data to understand that a lot of people see this information as a NEED to have.

Seems that they have configured their server with a broken set of re-direction rules that sens Firefox into an endless loop of HTTP 302 messages to the same page.

http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=LOGINFORM

GET /default.asp?action=LOGINFORM HTTP/1.1Host: www.sitemeter.comUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflateAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7Keep-Alive: 300Connection: keep-aliveCookie: USERID2=XXXXXXXXXXX; PASSWORD2=XXXXXXX; ASPSESSIONIDSSCDARAD=GLJMJECBGJPGPAFDLLIINGAM

HTTP/1.x 302 Object movedCache-Control: privateConnection: closeDate: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 13:22:04 GMTContent-Length: 149Content-Type: text/htmlLocation: default.asp?action=LOGINFORMServer: Microsoft-IIS/6.0X-Powered-By: ASP.NETSet-Cookie: USERID=; expires=Wednesday, 09-Nov-99 23:12:40 GMT; domain=www.sitemeter.com;Set-Cookie: PASSWORD=; expires=Wednesday, 09-Nov-99 23:12:40 GMT; domain=www.sitemeter.com;Set-Cookie: PASSWORD2=; expires=Mon, 01-Jan-2001 05:00:00 GMT; path=/Set-Cookie: USERID2=; expires=Mon, 01-Jan-2001 05:00:00 GMT; path=/

MSIE Lets you get to the homepage and then announces that the database for my site is unavailable.

ADDENDUM (JAN 8, 2005): Why is this article suddenly getting so many hits? Today, this single article has leapt to the lead of the greatest hits chart. Wonder what’s up….

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