Hey, Thanks, SiteMeter… (UPDATE: Quick! Into that Bunker!)
The new SiteMeter is hideous. If you don’t have a blog or don’t much sneak a peek behind those SiteMeter buttons you come across, then this isn’t going to mean much to you.
But for years, SiteMeter has provided a valuable service to bloggers with a simple, elegant, and inexpensive (hey, basic service is free!) way of tracking blog traffic. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of Google Analytics, but it worked well.
Now, it is crap.
For some reason, and I’m not discounting the influence of alien brain-suckers from the planet Cha-CHING! here, the honchos at SiteMeter have decided that simple and elegant is for suckers and what we busy bloggers really need is a blizzard of charts and buttons and drop-down menus and tabs all shoved into some Flash animation objects like Mama Cass Elliot shoved into a pair of Lance Armstrong’s bike shorts.
Initial reviews from the blogosphere are ugly. Randi Rhodes ugly:
Instapundit: Any recommendations for other free open counters?
Robert McCain: Like Windows Vista, is how bad it sucks.
McGeehee: As so often happens when somebody “upgrades” a service that works perfectly well, SiteMeter turned their hit-counter service into something completely unusable.
The Anchoress: Unusable…Awful. I’ll have to find a new product.
Ann Althouse: This is the worst non-improvement of a website I’ve ever seen. “Seen” is an exaggeration. I feel like I can’t even can’t see the new charts. It is ugly and unreadable.
William Teach: You can also pay $6.95 a month to get access to some extra data, but, quite frankly, I do not see the point, unless one is massively, hugely, monsterously obsessed by metrics.
Ace: I cannot begin to explain how awful Sitemeter is now. Stuff I used to be able to access I can’t. And it takes multiple clicks to see even the most basic information.
I’m going to keep the SiteMeter button, mostly out of habit. I’ve been using WordPress’s own blog stat-tracking tool. It’s not perfect, but it gives me the basic information I want. I had to stop using SiteMeter when I changed the site design to the theme I’m using now because the old code didn’t work well in a sidebar widget, which is where I put the SiteMeter and Technorati stuff. Without going into detail, that basically meant that I could tell how many folks were visiting the site, but not who was sending them here. I’d been out of the habit of checking SiteMeter and there’s no chance that I’m going to start now.
UPDATE: SiteMeter is announcing a rollback to the old stuff (via paggu.com).
Yes, and that’s all very good, but what the hell prompted this in the first place? It’s not like bloggers were jumping up and down and screaming “Yes! Oh, Yes! Hide all the useful stuff behind teeny icons, nearly-unreadble font sizes, and some thick Flash animation!” were they? As McGehee notes in the comments, there wasn’t even a little bit of a beta trial to work out the bugs.
Oh, and how’s about a little mea culpa here for the boneheaded move. The rollback’s nice and everything, but perhaps a little repentance and less pique might be a good idea, too.
Sheesh.
Other Posts of Interest:
Category: The Shack
They are going for a rollback
http://weblog.sitemeter.com/2008/09/14/sitemeter-…
Rollback!?
They should have skipped the rollout until they had some idea how the new system would be received.
Every other site I've seen start an upgrade process made the new version available in parallel to the old, as a "beta" test.
Not that it always worked out well — some of what used to be my favorite news websites went 90% Flash and lost me as even an occasional visitor.
Obviously, you're all just old-fashioned and unready for change.
You have to be _ready_ for new technology, or you'll get left behind…