The IP City Cluster Plugin (IPCCP) generates a geographical cluster map based on where from people access you website.
Author: | Thomas M. Bösel (profile at wordpress.org) |
WordPress version required: | 2.1 |
WordPress version tested: | 2.5.1 |
Plugin version: | 0.b5.8 |
Added to WordPress repository: | 14-01-2008 |
Last updated: | 05-06-2008
Warning! This plugin has not been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.
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Rating, %: | 0 |
Rated by: | 0 |
Plugin URI: | http://blog.vimagic.de/ipccp/ |
Total downloads: | 6 020 |
Active installs: | 10+ |
Click to start download
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The IP City Cluster Plugin (IPCCP) generates a geographical cluster map based on where from people access you website (or to be precise: based on the IP they got from their provider). It requires a statistics plug-in (that keeps a database or logfile) which keeps track of the IP. Key features include a preview with a lightbox way of zooming, image maps for city names and hit counters for both the preview and zoomed image, template output, smart clustering and user control over color, sizes and such.
Some of you might be familiar with the ClustrMap Service. I signed up this month and was instantly hooked. After a week or two I had two issues though. One: why didn't I sign up ealier (or how am I going to convince them to read my logfile)? Secondly you had to pay for the advanced service. Not my cup of tea (not to mention that you are always dependent on their service being up 😉 - I decided to look into writing my own cluster map WordPress plug-in. Key problem was of course the lookup of IPs. Fortunately MaxMind offers a free database and the required API to get City name, country name as well as longitude and latitude corresponding to an IP address.
See screenshots for an example.
Screenshots
IPCCP generated cluster map
mouse over cluster info
Fully configurable in the admin options panel
FAQ
Doesn’t seem precise, or what? =
Actually what we are looking for is accuracy. IPCCP is (of course) 100% precise (having no stochastic parts at all). Accuracy is a different matter. The longitude / latitude values are often more of an estimate. But MaxMind promises monthly updates, so keep checking their website and grab the current databases (or use the links above). But to be honest, for this matter I think it’s all good enough. It’s all about the impression if you ask me.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘)’, expecting ‘(‘ in [..]/ipccp/ipccp.php on line XYZ
Most likely you are not running PHP5, which is required for the GeoIP API to work. You need to upgrade before using IPCCP.
What if I still want more accuracy?
You can go ahead and buy their commercial Databases which are currently $420 (base price) + $102 (per monthly update) for the set of City and Country database.
What’s the legend to the cluster map?
I’ll add a legend as we go along. For now just this quick remark: you see four numbers at the bottom left. For the picture above they are:
* 2881492 IP-entries numbers found
* 2879499 IP-entries numbers found minus the Satellite Operators
* 45787 unique IP numbers
* 5696 unique places
* 727 unique clusters drawn
Why is there an option to disable the image maps?
Using the image maps will probably drastically increase the length of the HTML-code (especially if you have some million entries from all over the place). Just look at the source of this page… Some people might wish for the image only and don’t care for the additional information. Hence the option.
What was the issue with using the ipccp_out_smal.jpg picture as a preview?
IPCCP is generating three pictures. The native 2000*1000px ipccp_out.jpg
, the user specified large version ipccp_out_big.jpg
and the user specified small version ipccp_out_smal.jpg
. The scaling of the later two is done by the PHP GD library, which isn’t near up to standards if you ask me. Just compare the scaled version with the scaling done by the browser (which on OSX is done by the far superior QT). Hence I recommend leaving the small GD version be and simply use the big version. Given that most people will look at the zoomed version anyway that actually saves the download of two images.
How can I help?
If you have rights to any maps and are willing to donate them for the project, that would be great. I’ll add a feature where the user could choose his/her map from a given available set. The same holds if you have the rights to a more detailed database! Donate them and earn eternal gratitude from millions of WordPress Users.