Website Visitors from All Over
Visitors to this website are coming from countries across the globe, according to a new web app that tracks visitor locations. In the three days that this feature has been active, lifering.org has received more than 1100 visitors. Visitors have logged on to lifering.org from hundreds of different locations in the continental US, from Hawaii and Alaska, and from:
- Acacia Ridge, Boondall, Brisbane, Concord, Dolan’s Bay, Gladesville, Hampton Park, Heidelberg, Lysterfield, Melbourne, Moonah, Ormiston, Perth, Rooty Hill, Ryde, Saint Albans, Shenton Park, Surry Hills, Sutherland, Sydnia and Yatala, Australia
- Salzburg, Austria
- Gomel, Belarus
- Brussels and Houthalen, Belgium
- Vitoria, Brazil
- Barrie, Burnaby, Calgary, Cambridge, Elliot Lake, Goose Bay, Gravenhurst, Halifax, Kamloops, L’Assomption, Lower Sackville, Markham, Mississauga, Moncton, New Westminster, North Vancouver, Parksville, Peterborough, Scarborough, Surrey, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Vernon, Victoria, and Winnipeg, Canada
- Beijing, Fuzhou, Putian, and Shenzhen, China
- Bogota, Colombia
- Brno, Czech Republic
- Ballerup, Fredericia, and Odense, Denmark
- Unnamed place in Ecuador
- Espoo and Hyvinkää, Finland
- Kunheim and Vanves, France
- Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Hürth, Köln, Moraas, Nürnberg, and Recklinghausen, Germany
- Guam
- Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Calcutta, Coimbatore, Delhi, Faridkot, Haora, Hyderabad, Jammu, Karimnagar, Kophapur, Kottayam, Lucknow, Madras, Maisuru, Mangaluru, Mumbai, Nagar, New Delhi, Shimla, Surat, Tezpur, and Visakhapatnam, India
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- Athboy, Ballitore, Cork, Dublin, Kilcock, Limerick, Louth, Mayo, and Waterford, Ireland
- Haifa, Ramat Hasharon, Rishon Le Zion, Israel
- Gavorrano, Italy
- Osaka and three unnamed places in Japan
- Selangor, Malaysia
- Tijuana, Mexico
- Amsterdam and two unnamed places, Netherlands
- Auckland and Christchurch, New Zealand
- Leon, Nicaragua
- Muscat, Oman
- Angeles, Cavite, Cebu, Iloilo, Makati, Manila, Paranaque, Pasig, Quezon, Quezon City, and two unnamed places in the Philippines
- Cracow, Poland
- Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Velikiy Novgorod, Russia
- Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, South Africa
- Barcelona, Malaga and Torrelavega, Spain
- Stockholm and Stocksund, Sweden
- Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Kiev and Poltava, Ukraine
- Dubai, United Arab Emirates
- Aberdeen, Aldershot, Aylesbury, Bathgate, Belfast, Bicester, Bristol, Bromsgrove, Buckingham, Cambridge, Cardiff, Chertsey, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Guildford, Heywood, Kingston Upon Hull, Littlehampton, London, Luton, Maidenhead, Manchester, Methven, Newtownabbey, Nottingham, Oldham, Richmond, Ringwood, Rotherham, Sant Neots, Sheffield, Southampton, Southend-on-sea, Tattenhall, Telford, Weymouth, Worthing and four unnamed places in the United Kingdom; and
- Hanoi, Vietnam.
The visitor map can be accessed from the website’s Start Page, in the right sidebar, under the heading “Who’s Online.” Click on “Map of Visitors.” The map from the first three days is below.
This kind of mapping program can work because web hosting servers record every visitor’s IP address. The IP address is similar to a telephone number used by Internet sites. A reverse lookup database provides a rough estimate of the visitor’s location. Because of numerous variations and unknowns, the estimate can’t pinpoint the location more precisely than the city, and even that may be off; but on the whole and on the average, IP addresses provide a reliable indication of a visitor’s general location.
Happy to know this is global, I don’t feel so isolated in the cold U.P. of Michigan. Getting and staying sober is not for sissies…good to know there are many others who gather strength and hope from lifering.
hi john william powers –
please contact me at liferingoutreach@gmail.com, and leave me your phone # if you would like. i would be happy to call you to talk about other people in your area who might be interested in starting a meeting.
kathleen
Yes on Mapping folks and linking us, if I read correctly.
Older and not techy, I find this frustrating and confusing — and it seems that Cal, Oregon, and Tampa, for example, are LR centers.
Oh woe is us in the Midwest, Chicago namely.
So just a word of encouragement re your efforts.
John.
Thank you for your response. I’ll be in contact with the LR Service Center and will also reach out to the Delphi Forum moderators.
The LifeRing Service Center in Oakland has the capability to send emails and/or snail mails to LifeRing Press customers in a specific geographical area. This is, obviously, a different list than website visitors. You would need to get in touch with the Service Center, service@lifering.org or 1-800-811-4142, to discuss such a project.
As for the Delphi Forum, I’m sure the moderators there would be very happy to have someone take responsibility to guide the discussion in the direction of people becoming convenors.
Thanks for your response and the suggestion of using the Delphi Forum or the GCMS technology to more effectively connect people in specific geographic areas. I was not aware of the Delphi Forum on the LR website. I found the link to the GCMS very helpful.
Of course, my original idea is based on the desire to connect people in the LA/OC area to catalyze the formation of face to face support groups. One way is using outgoing emails targeting a specific geographic area. In the email, LR might invite people come to the area-specific forum to further this goal.
One other thing. Do you think it would be helpful to have someone take responsibility, using the appropriate forum, and guide the forum discussion in the direction something like “Are you ready to be a convenor; Lifering needs you”.
A regular bulletin board is probably not the answer for this need. I tried setting one up and it quickly became cumbersome and klunky. Even if it could be made simple enough to be attractive, it would soon turn into another general discussion board, duplicating what we already have on Delphi Forums (and elsewhere). This problem really calls for a more creative solution. I’m now looking at the Geo Mashups plugin, which is partly designed to promote community-building using maps, and might just be the answer — but it’s got a pretty steep learning curve. Anybody out there familiar with it, or with something similar? Have a look at this article on GMS’es.
You can run but you can’t hide.
Take Care
Bob O.
Marty,
You have done an awesome job of the new website and I have no doubt that word is spreading like wildfire. We are building a similar website in Canada based on the WP platform and I am excited about the possibilities for us also.
Your energy with this new website is contagious. Thank you for doing this. Perhaps connecting the website with Ning, Facebook and Twitter is next?
Michael
Thanks very much for your response to my comment. A bulletin board sounds like a great idea. I think the more the LR website can do to connect people that are in geographical proximity the better. Perhaps the bulletin boards can somehow be arranged in such a way that people in specific geographical areas have their own bulletin board. Face to face support groups in those areas should then naturally follow.
Of course such dedicated bulletin boards would need to be prioritized to be manageable. Perhaps the first area-dedicated bulletin board could be for the Los Angeles/Orange County area. From what I could tell from the visitors map, a significant percentage of people seemed to be based in that area.
We are now able to track the page views of visitors, but this feature has been installed too recently to be of use. We need about a month’s worth of data.
Using visitor log-ins as a source for outgoing emails isn’t possible, because site visitors’ email addresses are unknown. Only the IP address is known. We do know the email addresses of people who post comments, but that’s not what you’re talking about.
What might be doable is to provide some kind of bulletin board where people can post their contact info if they want to meet up with other people in their community. Sort of like a “ride board” at a summer camp where people advertise for getting or giving rides. I’ll search the WordPress plugins to see if someone has written something along these lines.
This is great news. Do we also track visitors once they are on the LR website? Do we know what percentage of visitors find the “Email List” on the “Connect with Lifering” click-through? If the LR website google analytics show few of the visitors check out our “Email List”, perhaps we should make the email sign-up a prominent feature on the LR homepage. Ideal would be using (with permission) this info for an outgoing email targeted to specific areas updating people regarding efforts to get face to face support groups up and running.