“Visits on previous day: 0”? Don’t worry… September 29, 2007

Between September 26th and September 29th, we have been switching to a new logging system, and there may be a small delay before it catches up with the correct totals. This means some of you will see “Visits on previous day: 0” underneath your large world map, but please be assured that the actual totals are indeed stored in our data base! We merely need to catch up, and are now re-processing that data, which means that by the end of this weekend (i.e. by Monday 1st October), your grand totals should be back to normal.

Many thanks for your patience. (We have used this phrase before, but what’s interesting is that each case has a new ‘twist’ and therefore a different explanation: it’s all part of ironing out some hidden ‘dependencies’ deep within the system, and we are pleased to note that our long-term stability and scalability has kept improving dramatically over the past year, and is looking better all the time!)

More MySpace ‘cat and mouse’ September 23, 2007

When ClustrMaps users try to embed their ‘thumbnail widget HTML code’ within a MySpace profile, part of it (specifically the A HREF part) looks disturbingly changed from the user’s point of view while they are trying to edit or save their MySpace profile. This is because the ‘outbound link’, in other words the link that takes you to your personal ClustrMaps large world map page, gets intercepted and changed for internal MySpace purposes. This is not inherently a bad thing (after all, it is MySpace’s site on which you are putting this code), BUT in certain cases the change may take you to a place other than what you expected.

MYSPACE USERS WITH EXISTING WORKING MAPS SHOULD BE FINE, BUT NEW CLUSTRMAPS USERS ON MYSPACE MAY EXPERIENCE THE PROBLEMS DESCRIBED NEXT.

The effect was described as follows in a Mashable posting on July 20, 2007:

Unlike other “blocks”, where MySpace would strip out certain URLs from user profiles, they’re now using redirects on outbound links. As you might remember, MySpace began replacing outbound links in the comment sections with “msplinks“, a sort of tinyURL system that allowed them to track outbound linking and presumably stop comment spamming. More recently, they expanded the system to MySpace profiles themselves: if you put a link anywhere on a MySpace profile, whether text, an image or otherwise, it will be replaced with a msplinks.com URL. Clicking it redirects you to the correct URL.

Except when it doesn’t. Those aforementioned companies are complaining that MySpace has “hijacked” URLs from certain companies, redirecting their links not the 3rd party sites, but to the MySpace.com homepage.

This is something we are now investigating as a matter of urgency. As we have written in the past, “We respect the MySpace terms and conditions of service and therefore do not want to encourage activity which is in violation of these terms. On the other hand, we are working hard to provide a viable mapping/tracking tool that fits appropriately within the rules of MySpace.”

We encourage ClustrMaps users who are having trouble getting their maps working properly on MySpace to write politely to http://www.myspace.com/myspacehelp or privacy@myspace.com to request that either this ‘stealth blocking’ of an innocent geographical hit counter be removed or that the policy be made much clearer and less prone to ‘surprises’!

Many thanks.

WOW: 2,000,000,000 maps and counting September 1, 2007

Wow, it seems like only a few months ago we were blogging with pride about having served up a staggering ONE BILLION maps – now we’ve just surpassed TWO BILLION, yes 2,000,000,000 [thumbnail] maps* served up by ClustrMaps ‘Mission Control’ to all of our loyal users and their site visitors.

We’ve got some rivals now, but hey: we’re simpler, faster, MUCH more scalable, and of course provide the greatest customer service from our Humble Headquarters. Want some more capabilities? OK, if you can keep it simple, then let us know!

Thanks, everyone!

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

*UPDATE 9TH NOVEMBER 2007: In our earlier ONE BILLION maps posting we made it clear what those number meant by saying “counting every dot on every user thumbnail map that has even been displayed, we have displayed over 1,000,000,000, ONE BILLION of them, meaning over 1,000,000,000 thumbnail maps have been served out from ClustrMaps Headquarters.” And this time the news/blog posting was intended to have the exact same meaning, i.e. counting every dot on every user thumbnail map that has even been displayed, we have displayed over 2,000,000,000, TWO BILLION of them, meaning over 2,000,000,000 thumbnail maps have been served out from ClustrMaps Headquarters at the time of the original posting. Of course the number is even higher by now. Since each registered ClustrMaps user receives many visitors, many thumbnail maps are served up for each registered user.

No popups either! August 16, 2007

We wrote previously “No cookes, no spyware: guaranteed!”. We forgot to mention ‘no popups either’, so thought that would be worth clarifying also.

If you see a popup, and mistakenly think it has something to do with ClustrMaps, you should re-read the earlier posting about no spyware, no cookies, and also read what we say below: there must be some other intervening code from your site or hosting service causing this, which has absolutely nothing to do with us!

We can reassure you 100% that we use

• NO cookies
• NO popups
• NO spyware

We don’t need any ‘extras’ because our counter works simply by counting the number of times the thumbnail map is displayed: that map is a plain .jpg image, that is all!

If you have something suspicious on your page, there is probably something else ‘nearby’ that may be causing your problem.

We are always happy to help users investigate further, but of course you should look quite deeply into the HTML on your page(s) before coming to us. The reason is as follows:

If you look at the HTML we provide (on your Admin page) you will see that option [D] is just a plain image, and a link to a big world map: that is all! The other variations [A], [B], and [C] simply include some error-checking code: this is only needed in the rare event that a server has crashed, in which case the error-checking code displays a temporary image saying ‘back soon’ – again, you can ask any HTML expert to go through our code in detail in they can confirm that is all that it happening: no popups are possible from our HTML. If you don’t understand the code options [A], [B], and [C], then use the simpler one, i.e. [D].

More than 2,000 Last.FM users and growing fast July 31, 2007

Hey, we know 2,000 is modest by the standard of today’s explosive social network mega-counts, but for little ol’ ClustrMaps it is a great sign that word-of-mouth take-up is healthy and expanding rapidly on so many of the great social networking sites. Last.FM users are starting to ‘vote with their feet’ and embed the world’s most scalable geographical hit counter widget (er, that’s us) on their pages, using the helpful site-specific instructions we provide on our HTML Setup pages.

Many thanks to our loyal and growing Last.FM fan base!

Technorati Tags: last.fm, , hit, counter, widget, geolocation

Temporary glitch for users with ‘www2’ accounts… FIXED July 25, 2007

[UPDATE: already fixed within minutes of the posting below 😀 ]

Hi everone – as 25th July at around 22:00 GMT we are urgently investigating a problem that you’ll see described in our FAQ page here (‘database is overloaded… not a user’, etc). In fact, this only affects people who have a ‘www2’ in their HTML code, and is caused by an internal database connection error that we are now investigating. As we say in the FAQ, your data and totals are in fact still logged correctly, because those are handled separately.

Many thanks for your understanding.