About For months, six months possibly, I've been experiencing worrisome incidents when visiting this blog myself to check how items have posted or layout changes. Now and then I've heard random noise, sometimes music, sometimes people talking and sometimes, usually through Safari on ios, a pop-up purporting to be from myspace.com asking for permission to see the current location.
After scanning my computers a dozen times for malware and viruses and checking the code on the blog several dozen more and finding nothing wrong and no ill effects elsewhere, I pondered and pondered and pondered, The West Wing scene featuring Toby Ziegler and his bouncy ball on repeat in my head because watching someone think is about the only recourse you have if you don't have any thoughts of your own.
I googled and googled. I used Twitter search and this morning, just now in fact after having the pop-up appear again on my ipad I googled and googled again and finally used the correct keywords in the magic combination and stumbled up this blog, a blog about solar energy written by someone trying to get the word out.
It's Site Meter.
For years, since I began this blog practically, I've had the little sitemeter square in the sidebar. Back then it was something you did, that you had, and when this blog began was about the only way to track how many visitors it was getting all thirty of them usually via Google. Since then, even though I've moved on to blogger's own counters and the like, I've kept it there as a historical curiosity.
Also since then, sitemeter's been sold on to another company and as part of its monetary strategy, has begun funneling ads through the sitemeter code on other websites and for months, six months possibly, that's been a pop-up advert for myspace. It doesn't appear with every visit and on most browsers it's blocked, apart from the audio which plays in the background, and on Safari ios asks for a location first.
Well, I've deleted the widget now and after reloading the blog a few times in ios Safari, the pop-up has gone too. None of you complained about seeing this thing yourselves so I wonder how many of you did. Did any of you notice? What did you think? Who you do trust? How do you know? Did Justin Timberlake know?
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