Okay, this is just getting stupid. I would like to draw your attention to the following comment, posted yesterday:
Comment by Larísa
on August 1, 2008
Oh! Finally I’m able to read your blog! Thats really, really lovely because I suspect your content’s good. But my reader just broke down everytime I tried to acess it (IE). Now there are no more error codes. And a bright, easy-to-read layout as well. Congrats! Looking forward to pay more regular visits.
She’s not the only one; that silly "Stack Overflow" error in IE stymied a lot of (would-be) visitors. I still don’t know what caused it, but I’m glad I was able to get rid of it.
So this evening, I invited a couple friends to take a look at the new layout. Imagine my shock when one of them said, "I think it looks nice, but all I have is a white page and an error message." HUH???
I launched IE7, clicked on my link to the Aerie…and CRASH!!!
WTF??
During the day, I installed a couple new plugins. So I immediately deactivated them and tried again. No dice. Okay, I deactivated ALL plugins (99 times out of 100, plugins, whether in WordPress or WoW, are the cause of 100 percent of the problems). STILL NO GOOD.
By this time it’s 1am or so and I’m damn tired. But I remembered I had made a couple minor changes to theme pages (the stylesheet to remove the border around images, and comments.php, to enable showing the time an article was posted. I double-checked to be sure my changes were CSS/php/HTML-compliant (for IE as well as Firefox). I reversed one change, just in case, fixed another little thing that absolutely should NOT choke IE (but I’m being cautious), and modified yet another change.
I’d also edited code in a couple plugins; however, those weren’t the culprits, because with plugins disabled, IE still breaks down.
If you can look at the site with IE, you know those things didn’t break it. It’s something in the theme, I am certain, since I’m able to access the administrative section of the site with no problem.
BUT WHAT THE HELL IS IT???
If anyone can give me a clue about where to look, I’ll be eternally grateful. I’ll give you a guest post slot. I’ll give you my next-born child.
PLEASE HELP ME!
/sobs
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{ 10 comments }
The answer is simpler that you would thought it to be. Apparently Sitemeter is crashing sites when they are viewed in IE7.
You care read more about it here: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/08/02/sitemeter-crashing-sites-when-viewed-with-ie7/
Hope that helps.
Tepisor’s last blog post: Minor changes to the site
If it makes you feel any better, IE is one of the major reasons I got out of web development. Getting a website to work usually consists of writing it once for Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. (basically every browser other than IE) and then spending a fortnight slowly breaking it in various nonsensical ways until it works in IE.
And then discovering that it’s now broken in everything else.
Internet Explorer is a malignant cancer of the internet; thankfully more people are using alternatives these days.
It’s been a long time since I tried to wrangle IE, but if I find anything out, I’ll let you know ASAP.
Edit: I just checked in IE 7 (specifically 7.0.5730.13) and it works just fine. Is it still crashing for you?
It’s something to do with cookies.
I went directly to this post’s page, and it was fine. I went to your home page, it was fine. As soon as I clicked “Back,” however, it started crashing.
I get a dialog saying “Operation aborted” and then a white error page.
Restarting IE had no effect. I then deleted all cookies from IE, and now your page is loading again. I go to your home page, and it’s erroring-out again.
I’m trying to get some diagnostic tools for IE to see if I can track down exactly what’s doing this. I shall lay a Freezing Trap and see what I can catch…
Hi! Unfortunately I have nothing to say about IE except install Firefox or Opera or Safari….anything BUT IE! lol…no really I hope you get the issues worked out because if history repeats itself every Microsoft OS user will forever be forced to use “their” browser…good, bad or ugly…I am a true believer in Firefox myself, have been for years now…but in any case I am probably not saying anything you don’t already know…so I will end this rambling by saying take care and have fun out there!
Progress update: I’m fairly certain it’s something coming from sitemeter.com. When I block that entire domain, the error stops occuring.
For the moment, I’d recommend removing all sitemeter stuff from your pages.
Itsnoteasy’s last blog post: Its’ Baseless Speculation Time!
Ok, last update: it looks like it’s sufficient to remove the two lines that pull in the sitemeter Javascript; the link and image itself appear to be fine.
That is, remove the following lines:
(WordPress ate mah HTML! I’ll email it to you…)
That should do it. I’m going back to killin’ raptors now. If you need me again, just fire up the Its’ Signal.
It’s Sitemeter code, remove it temporarily until they fix it. No, I’m not joking
If the Sitemeter script is wonky, simply remove the script and use it like a normal link to your Sitemeter page. For me, this still lets the meter know that you have visitors though you’ll be losing some information from the pings.
My site is on WP.com and uses Sitemeter as a normal link, and it’s still working fine.
Loronar’s last blog post: Improving Pet Raiding: WoW Web Stats
Sitemeter’s been hitting a lot of sites with its bug. The problem is it doesn’t look like you’re using it. My two-cent suggestion is test through each of your wordpress addons. If you’re willing to gamble, see if it’s statcounter. That’s the same sort of thing as sitemeter, and if it’s the latest IE patch interfering with a basic function instead of sitemeter having a bug, that might be the problem.
Remember – test by turning off ALL your addons and see if that fixes. If so, add one addon at a time till you see it break. And don’t forget to test all the addons because the problem might not be in just one.
==edit==
crap. I see you DID close all your addons and try. You did restart wordpress after closing them all, right – some of those keep going until reboot? feh, I’m sure you did. OK, I’ll ponder.,,
Kirk
@ Everyone: THANK YOU!! A thousand times, thank you!!
Kirk, yes, there’s a widget script to call Sitemeter. And I closed IE after deactivating the addons–was leaving nothing to chance!
As for IE, I don’t use it. Firefox is my browswer of choice, thank you very much! I was an early and enthusiastic adopter.
I have tried very hard to find something to like about IE (since my son works for MS, but not, thank Elune, as a developer!) (he used to use FF, but drank the kool-aid, I guess).
What’s interesting is that I didn’t touch the Sitemeter code between the time I opened the new theme (after MUCH testing and modding on my sandbox site) and last night, when things went to hell.
W E I R D.
Thanks again for all the help!
Kestrel’s last blog post: IE HELP WANTED!
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