This kind of bummed me out. The little Cluster Map widget in my sidebar that shows the red dots based on visits to the site was archived earlier today. I didn't know they did this. I looked at the blog today and all my dots were gone. I clicked through to see what had happened to them and there was an explanatory note saying they do this annually. I guess I didn't read that in the fine print when I set it up. It's a freebie though so I can't really complain about how it works. They explain too, that while users want the number of dots to just keep increasing (I know I do) the maps would end up being just a red smear. They do give you a copy of the little map before it "rolled over" so I have a little souvenir of the hit map for last year. Here's what it looked like this morning...

Page view statistics are one of the most fun parts of blogging for me. Seeing where people are who view the blog, and seeing where they linked from or what they were searching for if they came via Google or another search engine. It's kind of like bird watchers who carefully inventorying the birds they've spotted, or amateur radio operators collecting QSL cards.

I was so proud of all those red dots all over the place. Sure, a bunch of the more exotic locals were hits from odd Google results, but I still count those. At least I've got a hit already from China. I suspect this is from a family we know through our agency who received their daughter in Hefei today. Here's a LINK TO THERE BLOG.