Apparently the outage has affected thousands of websites. A couple of high-profile casualties include Statcounter and B3ta so I was in good company. We should have organised a little meet up so that we could hug each other and tell us it was okay. If only we had a way of communicating with the outside world…

Incidentally, B3ta is still not back up while I am. That’s obviously a reflection of the importance of my website. The downage of B3ta means means that, on this Monday, in offices across the land, there is the threat that some work might actually get done.

Anyway, it’s a good test along the lines of those thought experiments: “could you survive a day without blogging? Har har har.” “Could you survive a day without email? Ho ho!” The answer is yes and yes. This is probably helped a lot by the fact that I can’t actually be bothered to blog every day any more anyway.

However, it did mean that this week’s Scottish Roundup had to be delayed by over a day. I was writing the post when the explosion happened. I knew something was awry because WordPress’s autosaves weren’t happening. I was hoping that it would be a temporary outrage. Stayed up a bit. Gave up to try again in the morning. I was most peeved when it still wasn’t there in the morning. But I lived, and it’s better late than never.

As for email, I don’t know whether that was working or not. I assume not. I sent myself a test email last night from a different account and it came through this morning. But I don’t know if there is other mail floating around waiting for me to receive. My ego will not allow myself to believe that the only email sent to me yesterday was by myself. So anyway, if you have sent me an email since around 10 or 11pm on Saturday night, I haven’t received it. Just so you know.

But I had also noticed big problems accessing my Sitemeter account. The results pages were extremely slow to load, and often they didn’t even load at all. I thought maybe they were just having some temporary issues. These things happen from time to time and usually they get fixed eventually.

On Saturday evening I was putting the finishing touches to Scottish Roundup. I was wondering what I should use for tracking stats. I had used Sitemeter on my blog for years, but I was tempted by StatCounter. I had used it before on an old, long-forgotten blog, and it does the job fairly well.

When I was browsing the StatCounter site, I spotted this little ‘news item’ in the top corner of the page: “StatCounter Says NO!” No to what? I was intrigued. I clicked through, and read the post.

A few months back, StatCounter was approached by an advertiser, offered lots of $$$, and asked to include a spyware cookie on all of our member sites…we refused on the spot.

…

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

Oh, a familiar story. The blog post written by StatCounter did not name the provider involved, but this was clearly what I had been experiencing recently. But I couldn’t find confirmation. Although I had an inkling that they were talking about Sitemeter, I couldn’t be certain.

I opted to give Sitemeter the benefit of the doubt. I was, after all, used to their service and it had never caused any major problems for me before. I decided to keep the Sitemeter code on my blog. But the commitment from StatCounter was encouraging, so I chose to use StatCounter for Scottish Roundup.

Today I have read this post on Troubled Diva. Well it pretty much seems as though Sitemeter has been using dodgy spyware cookies which not only invades your privacy but — to add insult to injury — also makes your web pages as slow as hell to load.

It’s funny. Sitemeter always had a funny whiff about it. The pages were ugly, and unlike most websites there didn’t seem to be much of a human voice about them. It did feel like it was being run by either robots or secretive people. That had changed when they introduced their blog, but posts on that have dried up. And the fact that they haven’t replied to any emails or made any statement about this news speaks volumes.

Mike at Troubled Diva says that the problem hasn’t affected Firefox, but I use Firefox 2.0 and I noticed the chronic slowdown. Needless to say, I removed Sitemeter from this blog immediately and I have replaced it with StatCounter.

It’s madness for Sitemeter to do this though. Users of the internet despise spyware and anybody who assists in this kind of behaviour is portrayed as the some kind of spamming e-Hitler. It’s especially bad news on the internet, where blogs and the like allow this kind of news to spread like wildfire. Sitemeter’s reputation will be irreparably tarnished, and they won’t be able to make much more dirty money again. Certainly not by using me anyway.

• Eric Odom: Did Sitemeter sell out to Spyware?