All the Pages Are My Days

I've added a new feature over on the right side of the page. As you can see, the nominal location of the last few visitors to the site is listed. While not necessarily entirely accurate (see below), it's still kind of neat!

I say nominal (or is that pro-forma?) for a couple of reasons. One is that the location listed is that of your network access provider, and may not reflect where you're coming from. Another is that the list is not kept in real time.

This listing is implemented using a movabletype plugin I found at the MT Plugin Directory site; Gavin wrote the code and docs. He was apparently inspired by Ben Hammersley, whose site I've been reading for some time now.

More details on the techniques used to determine visitor location information is available.

Finally, as noted, this list is not kept in real time; in fact, it is only updated whenever the site is "rebuilt". Thanks to tima, I've now got a command line utility which I can execute via cron to rebuild the site index more often, say every 5-10 minutes.