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…