Another quarter, another BILLION February 8, 2008

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

Cleaner ‘1-visit-per-IP-per-day’ counts coming are here… January 6, 2008

We are starting to roll out across our various servers the promised ‘visit count’ improvement, as follows:

OLD STYLE (PAGE VIEWS): if someone visits your site 7 times from the exact same IP address within (say) a 1-hour period, or for that matter 7 times during a 24-hour period, that will increment your counter by exactly 7… making the counter more like a ‘hit counter’ (in fact, in this sense it works as a ‘page views’ counter) which is not always the best thing in the context of ClustrMaps, as opposed to a true ‘visit counter’, which is more appropriate for most users.

NEW STYLE (UNIQUE VISITS PER DAY): if someone visits your site 7 times from the exact same IP address during a specific 24 hour ‘time window’ (in fact the time window in between two occurrences of the ClustrMaps ‘counter processing’, which takes place typically around midnight UTC/GMT), it will increment your counter by exactly 1. This is much simpler and cleaner, and more consistent with our original description. We will begin this tomorrow for those on server ‘www3’ (you can see this in the HTML associated with your thumbnail map or large world map), and roll this out to the remaining servers during the coming week.

Happy New Year – 2007 big, 2008 bigger! December 31, 2007

Happy New Year to all our great ClustrMaps users and fans!

As widgets continue to proliferate generally, we are looking forward to a very exciting 2008…. stay tuned for more features, more easy-to-add-widget capabilities, more custom options, and more headlines: in fact, 2007 was a bumper year for us, and very shortly we will be breaking the ‘THREE BILLION (thumbnail) MAPS SERVED’ barrier!

Thanks again everybody: see you in 2008!

-The ClustrMaps Team

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

Secondary outage [fixed], 9-Dec-2007 @ 17:20GMT December 9, 2007

We’ve experienced a hardware failure, for which an engineer is currently on site undertaking urgent repair and rebooting. A proportion of regular ClustrMaps users may therefore see have seen a ’service back soon’ thumbnail image, and not be have been able to access the large maps – please bear with us: all will be restored! This is related to a problem we had earlier, and we will most likely replace the culprit machine. Shortly we will be moving to a full load-balancing architecture which will then protect us from individual server outages like this. Thanks for your patience. [UPDATE 21:40: this has now been fixed].

Essential maintenance outage, 20th Nov. 16:30-19:30UTC/GMT November 20, 2007

A key hardware replacement will be taking place during this period, 20th November 2007, from approximately 16:30UTC/GMT until approximately 19:30UTC/GMT, in the interests of longer-term reliability for one of our big servers. A proportion of regular ClustrMaps users may therefore see a ‘service back soon’ thumbnail image, and not be able to access the large maps – all will be restored!

Many thanks for your patience!

New pricing for optional ClustrMaps+ subscriptions November 11, 2007

We have had to make some adjustments to the pricing of our optional upgrade to ClustrMaps+ for those who want more detailed maps, much higher daily visitor limits, and huge archives of old maps.

In a nutshell, the weak dollar (our charging currency) against the strong pound sterling (our banking currency), combined with the transaction fees required to process each subscription, have meant that our $0.99 monthly subscription has really been more of a ‘giveaway’ from our point of view! To make it work for us, we’ve had to boost the price to $1.99 monthly. These days, that’s still cheap, and we’ve made a less steep increment to our 2-year package, now $23.99, in order to to keep to the ‘psychological threshold’ of $1/month – so this is equivalent to 12 free months at our new price. The 1-year auto-renew subscription option now boasts 4 free months, at the in-between price of $15.99.

If you are an EXISTING ClustrMaps+ customers, one with a pending renewals, you will of course be maintained at the exact same price you signed up for: $0.99 for monthly renewals, and $9.99 for annual renewals. The 2-year packages are not auto-renewing, so you will have to sign up at the new price if that price applies to you.

Many thanks again to everyone who has expressed an interest in ClustrMaps+.

YouTube clip features ClustrMaps in schools October 24, 2007

Today we discovered a wonderful blog posting entitled “A Clustrmap is a Powerful Thing” complete with an embedded YouTube video clip, courtesy Clay Burell.

The entry explains

Here’s a 2-minute snippet from a presentation I gave to parents to launch our 1:1 Apple Laptop initiative back in August. I simply explain Clustrmaps by showing it on a blog with world-wide readers….written by a 15-year-old.

And here is the clip:

Thank you Clay!