Visitor Map
I always thought the maps that certain blogs had that showed where their visitors were from; but I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about sending all of our visitor information to Google (for Google Maps) or subscribing to a “free” tracking service. Who and how often people visit this blog is nobody else’s business. I don’t necessarily think that the firms who operate those services are evil. I just don’t agree with information collection and aggregation as a business model.
Since the Bengals had a bye this week, I decided to create my own visitor map rather than watch some of the other NFL teams. It’s still a work in progress but I’m relatively satisfied with the result. The hardest part was finding a good cylindrical projection to use as a base image. (I’m not smart enough to derive the formulas for the other map types.) There now is a Locations section in the sidebar (just below the Local Weather section) that that shows a preview image of the current visitor map. Click on it to open a window with the full sized visitor map.
The statistics reset at the beginning of every month. And, since we don’t get that many visitors the map is only updated once a day. Here’s static image of the map as of today. Click the image to show the same page that appears of you click the map in the sidebar. It’s definitely not as interesting as California Girl but I still had fun. Maybe I’ll post a photo of her on Monday.
Very impressive for your own making! Nice work!
Viemoira: Thank you. It was a lot better use of the weekend than sitting on the couch eating leftover Halloween candy.
Damn, you’re getting your ass kicked in Kamchatka, Russia. Kidding – well done & very impressive!!
RB83: Some of the hits from the Russian Federation are legitimate; but others are spam. I don’t distinguish between the two then I am aggregating data for the map.
You are like, super smart mcb.
I find it hard to believe that you don’t have many visitors to this blog. That’s crazy talk!
Rage: Thank you. I can’t remember names very well; but I can remember obscure facts and formulas without any problem. I’d love to go back to the days when I had total recall; but those days are probably gone forever.
We actually average about 1100 visitors per day. Some are spam bots; but most are regular people. It’s to be expected; but less than one-half of on percent of the visitors leave comments. So, it doesn’t seem “busy” to us.
‘(I’m not smart enough to derive the formulas for the other map types.)’ I beg to differ. Anyone who can operate in systems like you seem to be able to has the smarts – maybe not the interest – but definitely the ability.
I say this from the perspective of having taught mathematics (particularly geometry which includes the technicalities of cartography now called geomatics) and computer science (theory and logic – not practice) for forty years.
Don (previously yondan)
Don: I do know the latitude /longitude to coordinate formulas for other types of maps. But, because the ones I like are based upon relative sizes of the land masses rather than relative distances, it’s difficult to come up with a good formula for the size of the dots. The current calculation aggregates everything within one degree together. If I used a different projection, I would need to enlarge the groupings latitude-wise as locations move toward the poles. We average about 1100 unique visitors per day so if I don’t group locations, there are too many dots on the map for it to be useful.