Autarchy of the Private Cave

As a follow-up to my previous post about ClustrMaps, today I found MapStats, who use Google Maps service to show the geographical locations of your visitors. They also provide some other pageview/pagevisitor statistics.

Actually, blogflux.com provides a whole set of miscellaneous tools for your blog/website: evostats.com (like mapstats mentioned above, but for websites), blog directory (dir.blogflux.com), PageRank checker (pr.blogflux.com), and some other services. In the course of discovering and using some of these services, I’ll write about what I found.

To use MapStats, you will need to register first (submit your blog to the blog directory). Though submitting a blog to a directory does not oblige you to insert blogflux’s code into your pages, MapStats do - otherwise you will have no statistics for your blog.

Here’s a sample map (for this blog). Unlike ClustrMaps, you cannot put some kind of a geo-thumbnail on your pages (if you go Pro - you can). However, you can insert the live list of ‘recent locations’, and also provide that list as RSS stream.

Free version of MapStats shows geographical locations of your visitors only for the current day. In order to select custom date ranges, you will need to “go Pro”. It might be possible just to bypass the “pro check”, but there’s no sense in doing so. Blog Flux Pro costs $4.77/month or $44.44/year.

Note, that putting any kind of tracker code/banners increases page load times. It is better to put any trackers or banners somewhere physically at the end of the page’s HTML code. This is not necessarily the bottom of the page - depends on HTML/CSS layout used (though for the majority of layouts, physical HTML page end is really close to the visible bottom of the page). I will consider moving banners to the footer, epsecially if there are more of them to “join” my pages.