Starting yesterday, Sitemeter has caused thousands of blogs to fail in Internet Explorer 7 for some reason.  Both Hot Air and Michelle Malkin sites have been affected.  According to Charles Johnson, the problem exists on Sitemeter’s own website.  It appears that Sitemeter changed its coding yesterday without warning its users, and without testing it before going live with the changes.

In a way, I feel a little silly posting this, because the people who really need to read this won’t be able to access it, and the people who can read this won’t have the problem.  It only affects IE7; all other browsers load the page with no problem.  I’m hoping that the message will filter through to our readers and they will start using alternate browsers to access their favorite sites.  In the meantime, we are working on disabling the Sitemeter code at both sites to restore full operability.

I use three different browsers for different purposes.  Primarily I operate the blog through Firefox, but when blogging, I like to have a separate window for news browsing (I like to alt-tab when writing), and I’ve noticed problems in the past when running two separate windows for Firefox simultaneously.  On my laptop, I’ve kept IE7 as the default to open links from my feedreader; on my desktop, I recently switched to Safari.  I’m still getting used to Safari, but I believe I like it a little better than IE7 and not quite as much as Firefox.  I particularly like the way that it displays history, but don’t like that it doesn’t allow for multiple home pages on startup like Firefox and IE7 does.  Safari has only crashed once and doesn’t seem to be the memory hog that both of the others are when running several tabs.

Even if you love IE7, it’s a good idea to have a second browser handy in case issues like this arise.  Sitemeter will eventually get its act together, and we’ll have our sites back up shortly.  Thanks for your patience.