Visitors map

Credit: renjith krishnan

Oh dear, if you ever think about changing your visits' widget, never go ahead by yourself without reading the instructions first. Especially if it only asks you for so little as to first update the widget, instead of remove the old widget and immediately installing the new one.What has happened to this blog is that the beautiful Earth map you have at your right is empty, or with just a bunch of visits. The others went missing. They just vanished.

That's the bad thing to happen if you imitate my manners. The good thing, though, is that it gave me the opportunity to write a few lines about widgets. Visitors counters in particular.

This is not an analysis of the widgets as they do practically the same: count the visits to your website or blog. The slight differences are related to visual aspects of the maps, with no really significant gaps in their performance. Here we use, Revolver Maps for no particular reason, it allows you to add rotating globes. They look nice and clean. In the same line there is ClustrMaps, a very well known and widely used. Colorful MapLoco and popular whos.amung.us close the list of the recommended maps. Check them out and decide which one looks best on your site.

Those widgets are gracious to use in a blog, as they break the statistic layout and bring some interesting and curious gadget to a website. However, they are not really good for tracking purposes. There are other tools which fit better at tracking, as they were created for this aim. But this issue will be addressed in another entry.