Many webmasters got a shock yesterday when they saw errors appearing all across their websites. Like any other self-respecting, highly trained, meticulous webmaster, the first thing I did was panic, go into a cold sweat and let out a string of expletives (not in that particular order). Then, the next move was to call my other webmaster pals and check the forums.

I could have saved myself a lot of headache it I had put on turned on my eagle-eyes and checked the error. Apparently, someone in Googleplex left out a semicolon somewhere. Or, perhaps in the busy cyberspace traffic, it fell off. In any case, here's an example of what millions of people saw when they visited sites that were displaying Adsense :

Well, at least it shows that our esteemed associates in Googleland are not infallible. One of the things I dislike about coding in PHP and Javascript is the use of the semicolon. Forgetting your semi-colons can mean up to an hour of debugging your scripts, or as in this case, if you don't do any scripting, can mean a near heart attack.

So if you've been checking your Adsense stats and wondering why it seems a bit low yesterday, you know why now.