Well, so Much for Sitemeter

I started blogging here at KN@PPSTER in 2004, and I think I installed Sitemeter shortly thereafter (within weeks, I'm guessing). It's about to go away. More on why below, after the sentimental crap.

Between then and July 28, 2008, I racked up -- according to Sitemeter -- 559,104 visits to the site and some unknown number of page views. I know the visit number because when I switched Sitemeter accounts (the first one was linked to an ISP email address that went away, I forgot the password, etc.) I punched that number in as the starting point for the new Sitemeter account and it still mentions that at the bottom of the summary page.

Since then, Sitemeter says KN@PPSTER has climbed to a total of 906,317 visits, with about 1.15 million page views since the changeover. I was kind of looking forward to ticking over the 1 million visit mark, but it's not nearly as important to me lately. A million visits is cool but it's not like an earth-shattering number for web traffic or anything.

So anyway, I've actually made a habit of putting Sitemeter on sites I run. It's not necessarily better than e.g. Google Analytics or the stats that Wordpress has started offering lately, but it is a pretty quick and easy way to see where the last 100 hits came from and that sort of thing.

But lately I've been noticing that some of my sites are loading slowly, that after they've loaded they tend to start  "churning" again seemingly at random, with strange "connecting to" statuses regarding sites I've never heard of. In particular, x.vindicosuite.com slash yadayadayada. And sometimes I'll get a blank page with a "couldn't load" message and a vindicosuite.com URL before the page fully loads.

I was starting to worry that I had some new kind of ChromeOS malware or something going, or that it had to do with the ad broker I use to monetize some of my sites, but after a bit on the search engines, I came across this blog post by Jim McBee. And I immediately realized and quickly verified that yep, this stuff seems to be happening to me on my sites (and other people's sites) that run Sitemeter, and to not be happening on sites that don't have visible Sitemeter installations in their sidebars or footers.

Nope. Nopenopenope. I'm done with Sitemeter. If it's not gone by the time you read this, it will be gone shortly thereafter. Maybe I'll replace it with some other visible counter, maybe I won't. I wouldn't mind being able to note and celebrate one million visits. But it's not that important.

Buh-bye, Sitemeter. Sorry it didn't work out.