Dave’s Rants

Ages back, probably last March or so I registered for Digg.com. I thought it was pretty cool at the time but for one reason or another I didn’t ever get into it. Now fast-forward to now, I’m currently through 2 weeks out of 4 where I’m at home with practically nothing to do so I’ve been seeking out new content to absorb all over the place.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed is a homemade TV show - is that the right phraseology? - called Systm. I found Systm through MAKE Magazine ages ago and downloaded a few episodes but only recently got to see them. Then I noticed that the same people do a Podcast so I subscribed to it in iTunes and it was good. It’s called Diggnation and is basically about the most popular (’most dugg’) items on Digg.com.

Anyway I’ve digressed but today after listening to the show I checked out Digg.com and I saw a link to gVisit.com. gVisit is a web service that allows you to map where your visitors have come from. It’s free so I stuck in the little bit of code onto my site and a short while later I have a nice map like the one you can see above. The really cool thing is that it uses the Google Maps API so you can go and zoom right in to see where exactly your visitor (well really your visitor’s ISP) is located! So you can zoom in to the crowded North-Eastern US and see where all those Red things are actually pointing.

The only drawback is that the free version only shows the last 20 visits, but since it’s one of those great sites that allows you donate whatever you choose I may throw €5 or €10 their way and get the full version.