ClustrMaps : Java Glossary

Note the spelling. ClustrMaps is missing an e. ClustrMaps is both a free and pay service to count hits and to produce cluster maps of where in the world your visitors are coming from. It is free if you have under 2500 visitors to your site daily. (That means mean unique visitors, not page hits.) In any case, the pay version is only for two years. If your visitors click the ClustrMaps icon embedded on your web pages, they can browse world maps to see where fellow visitors to your website are coming from. The service can also be used with various blogs.

What Does It Look Like?

See the ClustrMaps icon in the bottom left of this screen, above the CMP (Canadian Mind Products) logo. It contains count of the number of visitors and a thumbnail version of your generated cluster map.

What Does It Track?

Even though counter images can appear on many or all your pages, they all display the same count, the total number of visitors to your website. If a visitor looks at the same page 20 times in a 24 hour period, that only counts as one hit. If the visitor looks at 10 different pages in a 24 hour period, that only counts as one hit.

How Does It Work?

You embed HTML/JavaScript on all your web pages, or at least the most frequently visited ones. It will display an image loaded from the clustermaps.com website. As a side effect of serving you the image containing the latest count, they count hits and track where visitors came from. It is very simple in principle, just displaying an image from their website. They get fancy and add some JavaScript to display a different image if the server is down. Of course it can only count visits to pages where you have embedded the image link.

They provide the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) in various forms, but all it amounts to is fetching an image with the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the site (not page) embedded in the name of the image.

The cluster maps and the count embedded in the icon are recomputed only once a day.

ClustMap’s servers are very fast. They use a distributed cloud of servers, so there is no detectable delay in loading your pages. They are headquartered in Pennsylvania.

ClustrMaps has no need for cookies or spyware.

They ask that the counter image always be visible since that is how others find out about their service.

Markup

The official version of the markup is quite bulky. What follows is my trimmer variant. They don’t provide HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language v 5), but if you put the markup they do provide through a validator it is easy enough to make the changes. There are two pieces. There is no need to embed the JavaScript part in every page. You can just load it from a common file:

Here is what the second part of the markup you embed might would look like in HTML5 at the spot you want the image to appear.

• You can test that your JavaScript error-recovery code is working by temporarily substituting the name of a non-existent image file in your HTML5 markup.
• The browser automatically puts the URL of the page you are viewing into the header of the message it sends to clustrmaps.com in the header. When you load a page from local hard disk, this does not happen, so ClustrMaps, in that case, does not know what page the request came from, but does not matter. ClustrMaps tracks only cumulative website statistics, not individual page statistics.

Gotchas

• When you register, they will send you two emails. If you don’t see them, look for them in the junk mail folder. Wait for the second one that contains your password and a list of useful URLs (Uniform Resource Locators).
• It takes several days for the service to start working after you get your markup embedded. At first, a dummy image comes up, then a blank image. After it has accumulated some statistics to show, then the proper cluster map thumbnail appears.
• There is no mechanism to stop a malicious person from putting my markup on his webpages to screw up my counts. ClustrMaps support have had no trouble of this sort. They said they would check the headers to make sure requests were really coming from my server if there is ever trouble.
• Obviously, when you sign up, the counter is 0. It has no way of going back in time to collect old hit data. It will be periodically reset to 0, so your maps will reflect recent traffic. If they did not do that, your maps would be solid red with visitors, making no distinction about which geographical regions are generating the traffic. Clustrmaps is not a proper hit counter, namely one that tracks hits since day 1. It tracks recent hits only incidentally to buildings its cluster maps.

Outstanding Questions

If people view a page loading from local hard disk, will this count as a hit? It will load the image, but there will be no referrer in the header, so ClustrMaps knows it is locally loaded.

If you live in a remote part of the world and you use the The Replicator, then you could download a mirror of this website and click a page and then click the ClustrMaps icon to see if it registered you as a recent hit. That would settle the question.