We've been a little quiet on the product announcements recently. That's mainly because we're working on some big enhancements that are coming soon, but in the meantime, in addition to a ton of bug fixes and minor enhancements here are some changes that we think you're going to love.

Map Styling

Since we released the custom maps widget in June we've been bombarded with requests for enhancements. Top of the list was the ability to change the size and colour of map points. Well now you can!

Updated documentation can be found here but, in short, you can either add the size (1=tiny 10=large) and colour attributes next to the coordinates of each point or, for greater control over appearance, simply add a CSS class to each map point and upload a CSS file with the required attributes for that class to define the point's colour and opacity and it's stoke attributes.

Look out for country and region map zooming in the next couple of weeks.

Chartbeat & GoSquared Maps

If you're using real-time web analytics services chartbeat or GoSquared you can now see the location of your most recent visitors on a beautiful Geckoboard map. WARNING: Watching this update can get very addictive, but if you're a real-time map junkie like me then you're going to love it!

Private RSS & Atom Feeds

In addition to regular, public RSS and Atom feeds that you've been able to display on your dashboard for some time, from today you can also display private feeds that require a username and password. This is great news for customers of tons of services out there that offer protected feeds and getting them on to your board is a snap. You can find the RSS and Atom widget under the "Notifications" category.

That's all for now but we're looking forward to hearing what you think in the comments below.

You can use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to keep up-to-date with news and future updates.

This is something I've been looking forward to announcing for some time now. Welcome the latest addition to our custom widget types -- the custom map widget!

Many of you have been asking for a way to visualise anything with a geographic element including the location of current site visitors or dispatch addresses for recent orders on your dashboard, and now you can.

If you're feeling creative you can knock out a script to connect to the increasing number of location aware web services with APIs and see location data side-by-side with your key business metrics on your Geckoboard status board.

We're starting with a custom widget only but many existing integrations will have a map widget added soon, stay tuned for further updates.

Check out a live map widget here.

Version 1 of the map widget accepts:

• Lat, long coordinates
• IP addresses
• Host names 

It renders the location of each point on a beautiful map which updates frequently. We even have some new widget sizes for these maps so you can really show it off.

We're currently testing further input types such as city and postal codes and I expect these to drop very shortly. In the meantime, check out the documentation in our support forum and get started on your own geo-feed!

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