Recently a friend on a social network posted a map of the countries where he'd traveled. Being someone who loves maps, I had to check it out. Created by the people at Amcharts, presumably to showcase what their Javascript libraries could do, what *I* like about it is something very simple:
Using the map doesn't require me to login or deal with any tracking info.
All that is required is to add the country codes on to the URL. Here's what I mean - this is my list of visited countries (as of August 2016):
https://www.amcharts.com/visited_countries/#AT,BE,BG,CH,CZ,DE,DK,FI,FR,GB,IE,IT,ME,NL,PL,UA,RU,CA,CR,GL,MX,US,AR,BR,CO,DJ,EG,MA,ZA,CN,IN,SG
You can see there all the country codes.
But that's it. I can bookmark that URL. I can copy and paste it. I can modify it.
There's no other login or anything required.
Over the years, I've tried a few other map sites like this one, but often they seem to require you to login to copy the map. Or they had a cryptic URL that basically made it so you had to post it to Facebook using their particular code ... or something like that.
(Now, this site does have sharing buttons out to social media, but I can choose NOT to use them and just share the URL directly.)
Kudos to the Amcharts team for making this available - and making it easy to have a URL you can use and share.
And yes, clearly you can see that I haven't visited a whole lot of the Southern Hemisphere ...
P.S. They also have a "Visited (US) States" map, but mine would be boring as I've been to all 50 states...
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