A few weeks ago I added “ClustrMaps” (I don’t think a singular form exists) to Mayron.net. You can see it in the sidebar. It was inspired to add it after seeing one on Oge Marques‘ blog.

While this type of information is available to anyone who has access to the IP addresses of those that visit a site, I thought it was interesting enough to share these locations. The service appears to do a decent job at filtering out the IP addresses of known spiders and other automated agents, leaving behind mostly legitimate hits.

Many of my former colleagues from MLAB at FAU have been traveling abroad this summer, to places such as China (Beijing), Malaysia, Austria, Brazil (Curitiba), and Colombia. Hits from all of these locations show up. The largest concentration of hits is in the vicinity of Phoenix, AZ, although I’m not quite sure why (perhaps there’s an ISP based there that isn’t being filtered yet?).

It’s interesting to contrast the new ClustrMaps with the Guestmap I’ve had on my site for over six years (a link to the Guestmap is just below ClustrMaps in the sidebar). I only recently moved the Guestmap to the front page — it was previously buried on the About page. Unfortunately, the Guestmap only retains the most recent 100 entries, so many have been deleted. The Guestmap asks users to manually select their location and add an entry — only a fraction of visitors will do this. An example of a more modern implementation is Frappr.

I just setup  Recaptcha to help combat comment spam. While Akismet does a good job, recently more and more comments have been getting through its filters. Recaptcha is a project being developed by Luis von Ahn at CMU (previously mentioned on this site). One nice thing about the Recaptcha project is that it makes use of the effort to improve OCR (optical character recognition) accuracy. Captchas are generated from scanned text and the results are used as the digital interpretation.

I apologize for the lack of updates this month.

I apologize for the lack of updates this month.

I’ve made some updates to the site! Besides cosmetic changes to the design (new navigation, better colors, faster loading) there is an updated research page and new teaching page. On the research page you’ll find links to my CV and research interests. On the teaching page are links to my teaching philosophy and teaching interests.

Mayron.net is now using a modified version of the Hemingway Reloaded theme. Of course, many more changes will be made to the theme to suit my tastes. One of the most noticeable changes you can see already is the randomly colored bottom section of the page. The new look is certainly a departure from the design of most sites.

You can now view a dynamically-updated list of the ten most popular posts on Mayron.net in the sidebar.

There is now a list of recent and random posts (some nearly 4 years old) in the sidebar. The “Features” module has been removed and replaced with links at the top-right of each page.

Hopefully there won’t be as much spam this time…

I’ve made some changes to the design of the site. Site navigation links are now listed horizontally at the top of the page, along with the search box. The page background has changed. Page layout graphics are all dynamically generated.