We’ve simplified our home page and made an instant ‘Make my map’ signup form. This form appears not only on the home page, but also at the very top of the page of every large map that gets displayed (example), making it significantly simpler for ClustrMaps newcomers to get their own maps.

This new ‘Make my map’ capability shortcuts the original multi-step procedure of having to sign up, wait for an email password, note the password, log in, and finally get the HTML code. Instead, there’s a 1-step ‘Make my map’ which immediately SHOWS YOU THE CUSTOM HTML that you need to put on your page. Moreover it provides this code in several optional formats, e.g. for those who need simplified ‘pure HTML’ code for MySpace, those who need BBcode for Wikis or Last.FM, and so on.

Of course, the new ‘Make my map’ setup also emails you a brand new automatically-generated password so that you can log in later if you need to re-retrieve the HTML, or if you need to adjust any of the options such as your update or archive frequency, not to mention future options such as custom map designs that we have in the pipeline at the moment!

In order to avoid a recurrence of some of our hosting provider’s (quite brief) power outage problems last month, several steps are taking place beginning this week: the hosting provider is getting ready to bulk-move their data centre to an even more secure site, and we at ClustrMaps are taking additional pre-emptive steps of our own to provide redundant servers at a completely different physical location.

There is nothing that users need to do: To avoid any outages, we will be changing the DNS entries so that the new servers automatically supersede the old ones. The only noticeable effect should be that there is a small delay in the overnight batch runs that do all the map drawing and dot-clustering. This delay is needed to ensure that all the servers are perfectly synchronised after the switchover. The switchover is scheduled to take place beginning on Monday 21st April, and should be completed by the next day. If you have ‘typical’ daily totals, you may notice a minor variation because the period between updates will be a bit longer than 24 hours. On the other hand, this variation will be un-noticeable to most users.

[UPDATE: AS OF 13TH MARCH 2008, THE DRAFT WORDING BELOW SUPERSEDES THE ORIGINAL WORDING]

This is just a ‘heads-up’ about a clarification we want to introduce next week to the Privacy Statement on our Legal and Terms of Service page (to take effect 13th March 2008).

Current wording: “ClustrMaps Ltd is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. We will not sell, share, rent, or give away this information to others in any way.”

Draft new wording: “ClustrMaps Ltd is the sole owner of the information collected on this site and through facilities described in the Description of Service above. We will not sell, share, rent, or give away such information, above and beyond what is already visible in the public domain through our sites and services, or as may be required to comply with due process of law. In cases where such ‘due process of law’ is involved, we will assess and deal with the legal implications and advise any affected users of our services accordingly.”

[end of draft new wording]

Explanation: This new wording is intended to state, in a more explicit manner, two things that were left implicit previously, namely: (i) that information that is already visible to the public, such as URLs in ‘league tables’ like our Top 1000 free users or associated map information, which our Terms of Service already describe, is still visible to the public, (that’s what ClustrMaps is all about, and as mentioned here ClustrMaps+ users are already kept out of such leage tables anyway), and (ii) we need to remain compliant with due legal processes. Regarding ‘due legal processes’, if information is requested (e.g. through a court summons or subpoena) we will have to consider how to deal with it accordingly in order to comply with the relevant laws, taking formal legal advice concerning which legal jurisdictions are appropriate, and in such cases we will of course inform any user affected by such a summons or subpoena before taking any further action.

More concretely, your very-fine-grained data (IP addresses and locations and numbers of visitors to your site from each IP address, as well as your login information and email address) is secure and private - but in the worst-case scenario it may be demanded of us by a legal authority, exactly as they may demand of any hit counter or tracking tool or service! We will then have to consider whether THAT legal authority takes precedence over your privacy, our rights as provider of the ClustrMaps Services, our relationship with you (which we value most highly), and the UK Data Protection Act. These decisions are not easy, and no such requests have ever been made of us, but we need to be prepared for such eventualities. In such cases we would of course keep any affected users completely informed of our decision-making processes throughout!

Users love ‘leaderboards’, ‘league tables’, and the ability to see what other ClustrMaps users are up to. For this reason, we have decided to bring back a feature we had a long time ago, but in a bigger way: rather than listing (say) the top 10 or top 100 users, we are going for the TOP 1000 USERS. By default, we only list users of the free service, on the grounds that paying users have typically expressed interest in more privacy. Also, free users have a lower limit on the number of daily visits we typically expect them to receive, and this makes it more appropriate for this kind of table.

Link: ClustrMaps Top 1000 Dailiy (Free) Users

NOTE 1: Gigantic high-volume users are not shown! The reason is as follows: to keep this fair and more accessible to the ‘middle and low volume users’, we provide an upper-limit cutoff, so only the top 1000 users with less than the cutoff number are shown. This cutoff (maximum) limit is displayed on the Top 1000 Users page at http://clustrmaps.com/top-users.html, and may change from time to time, but is typically around 10,000 or 15 ,000 visitors daily. We consider this a very fair and lenient policy - after all, our announced limit for free users is 2,500 visitors daily. But since we take pride in the fact that our service tends to provide a much more scalable display than others, we want to remain somewhat flexible!

NOTE 2: Paying (ClustrMaps+) users are not shown! This is explained in the opening paragraph.

NOTE 3: The list is updated every day at approximately midnight GMT/UTC.

ClustrMaps is now available as a 1-click drag-and-drop widget on the WordPress-powered and highly popular Edublogs.org family of blogs.

Edublogs, which now hosts over 100,000 bloggers in the educational communtiy, has today rolled out a ton of new capabilities, including much richer multiple language support, themes, widgets, etc; ClustrMaps is proud to be part of that rollout, and wishes the best of luck - and a hearty thanks - to the Edublogs.org team! Read their announcement here.]

The idea is simple, but the execution has involved some warmly-welcome cooperation from the Edublogs.org team. The end result is a much easier method for adding ClustrMaps as a ’sidebar widget’ in your blog. Right now this applies only to Edublogs.org users, although we aim to roll this out much more widely in the very near future.

Below, we describe the main difference, primarily for brand new signups at Edublogs.org:

Old (regular) way: to get a thumbnail map on your blog, you need to
1. go to the ClustrMaps Get one! page
2. link from there to the registration page
3. fill in your URL and email
4. submit
5. check your email for your fresh password
6. go to the Admin page
7. sign in with URL and fresh password
8. copy the HTML
9. edit your blog sidebar by dragging a text widget (or similar)
10. paste the HTML you copied at step 8.

Widgeted (new) way… [don't forget to go to your login/dashboard "Presentation... widgets..." screen first!]
1. edit your blog sidebar by dragging the ClustrMaps widget [similar to 9 above]
2. open the widget’s options to fill in your email - the URL is already there, and save it

That’s it… the no-brainer simplicity of true widgets. For widget developers and bloggers this may seem like a kind of obvious ’so what?’ step, but there’s more here than meets the eye: The real news is that this requires the buy-in of the hosting service, because we ask for a few extra things over and above many simple widgets: First, we ask for the user to agree to our terms and conditions, which is a way of ensuring that there are no odd side-effects if someone misuses the maps, fakes traffic, suffers an attack that affects our own servers, etc. Second, we ask the user to supply an email address so that we can provide personalised user support in case of questions or difficulties, and also to allow a route for people to go into their (custom) Admin pages on ClustrMaps.com and edit some of the options if they want (more will be coming soon, like customised look), and to upgrade to ClustrMaps+ . We are very careful to be up-front about what we ask for, and not to provide any hidden code or tricks. And of course the user’s email address is never used for anything other than a rare service announcement from us.

We welcome our new community of users, and thanks again to James and the rest of the team at Edublogs!

Technorati Tags: clustrmaps, clustermaps, hit, counter, map, widget, edublogs, wodrpess

We had to restart some of the server jobs on 11 February, and there was a small knock-on effect on the overnight runs which would have resulted in reporting a total of 0 hits for some users, but as mentioned in our FAQs, this effect is nullified over time since the log files ultimately have the correct totals. We are sorry about this: these occurrences are growing increasingly rare, and any user affected by this should definitely get back in touch if things do not look healthy again within 2 days from the original occurrence. Many thanks!

Wohooo…. last quarter’s 2,000,000,000 maps and counting story had us all excited… well, another quarter has flown by, and we’ve racked up another BILLION thumbnail maps displayed, now surpassing 3,000,000,000 in all.

We’re still the fastest geo-counter-widget on the planet, and still the most scalable, and naturally the one with the best customer service, in the rare case you ever need it!

Thanks, everyone!

Technorati Tags: clustrmaps, hit, counter, geolocation, map, widget, analytics