Firetop

Last week I managed to pick up a cold, one of those ones where you feel it coming on for a few days, do your best to fight it by drinking lots of orange juice… but in the end wake up at 3am in a cold sweat and a memory full of nonsensical fever dreams (mine usually involve cats dancing on tables). I’ve been exhausted for the past four days, so the weekend was a frustrating write-off - no trips out of the house at a vital ‘Christmas shopping’ time… just Web, TV and Xbox Live. I did manage to find a few hours to upgrade this blog a bit with some useful functionality though - ‘Mapstats’ and ‘Snap Preview’ of most interest.

Mapstats is available via the link on the bottom right menu, hosted by Blogflux (a blog directory with a range of additional tools). Mapstats tracks each visitor to Firetop, and matches their specific referrer details to their exact location, then using Google Maps it displays a graphic representation. This gives a world overview of where web traffic is coming from, combined with referrer data. For example, I can see that today at 1:57pm an Apple Mac user from Santiago in Chile did a google search for ‘banner ad best design’ in order to find this blog. I’ve made the tool public so you can play around with it and see where fellow visitors are coming from.

The other tool I added is ‘Snap Preview‘ - any time that you come across a link to an external website, just mousing over the URL will pop-up a graphic ’speech bubble’, containing a screenshot of that website. This means you can take a look to check it’s somewhere you want to go before you even go there! I personally love this functionality, but I’m interested to know what other people make of it too, so I’ve installed a reader poll plug-in to get some opinion on Snap’s usefulness.

Technorati Tags: mapstats, blogflux, snap, blog tools

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