Friday, 05 May 2006, 11:49:21 EDT

I don't know if anyone noticed, but I added a new button a couple months ago. It was a huge button that said "IP2Map." If you had clicked on it, you would have seen a world map with little red silhouettes on it. Each silhouette represented one visitor to this site out of the previous 100. I found it neat information to have and share. The problem with IP2Map is it is a commercial service. They will let you do as I was doing, generate a non-interactive map, but if you want more stats you have to pay them for more service. That is fair, since they do have to pay for their equipment and bandwidth; but it isn't that important to me. However, I stumbled upon a similar service today that uses Google Maps to generate the map — gVisit. That means more stats, and an interactive map, for free. The downside is that gVisit limits the history to twenty users unless you make a monetary donation, of any value, to the site. That is fine by me because I don't need the 100 that IP2Map offered. Maybe one day I will forward $5.00 their way and get the extra history and removal advertisements on "my map." This will work for now, though. It will take a day for the map to start updating (it is updated daily, not in real-time), but you can view my map at any time by using the new "gVisit:Map" button.

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