Blogging is a new experience for me. I’m learning interesting things as I try to build this site. Although I’ve built a website before, I’m discovering I still have a lot to learn. Unfortunately, no one else in my circle of friends is a blogger, so I learn through trial and error.
I wanted to put a “counter” on my blog so I could see if I was getting any traffic. Because Bravenet is affiliated with the program I use to build my website, I decided to take advantage of their “free” hit counter. With no technological skills to my credit, I was able to cut and paste the html code to my Blogger page with no difficulty at all. So far, so good.
Being a lazy person, I didn’t bother to log into the account to check my statistics. I simply double clicked on the counter at the bottom of my page each morning. I was annoyed that there was a floating pop-up in the middle of the page, and I had to close it to view the statistics. But, I decided to live with it.
A few nights ago, I did an AdAware scan on my computer before I went to bed to clean out the traffic cookies. There were an unusually large number of them, but I ascribed that to the fact that I’ve been surfing the net a lot more lately.
The next morning I sat down with my cup of coffee and my bleary eyes to post on my blog. I double clicked the hit counter and there was that irritating pop-up. I didn’t aim correctly when I tried to close it and inadvertently opened the ad that was hidden behind it. It opened my eyes in a hurry! A pornographic ad with a woman’s bare breasts was on my screen. Ahem!
I went to the Bravenet site to register an abuse complaint, which took a little bit of clicking around on their site. I then removed the counter from my blog. For some reason unknown to me, I decided to run another AdAware scan. More than 100 traffic cookies registered. The only site I had visited other than Blogger was Bravenet. I’ve had no reply from Bravenet.
Now I have a new hit counter from Site Meter. It was “free,” too, so you can bet I’ll be monitoring it closely. I apologize if you clicked on my previous hit counter and saw a pornographic ad—unless that was what you wanted to see.
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