From a blank map to a filled one
Four steps. The slow part is remembering where you have been.
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Make an account
Registration asks for a name, an email address and a password. That is the whole sign-up; there is no mailing list. Your maps are private to your account unless you share one.
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Pick a map
US states The fifty states, counted out of 50. Countries of the world 235 countries and territories, drawn on the Equal Earth projection. Counties in one state Choose a state (or DC) and fill in its counties. All US counties 3,142 counties and county equivalents across the fifty states and DC. You can have as many maps as you like, of any type. Each has a title and one fill colour from six presets.
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Fill it in
- Click or tap a region to mark it visited. Tap again to clear it. Hover, or press and hold on a phone, to see its name.
- Type in the search box to find a region by name and toggle it. On county maps this is often faster than hunting for it.
- Zoom and pan with a pinch, a scroll wheel or the buttons. Small counties get big enough to tap.
- Switch to the list view for every region with a checkbox. It works with a keyboard and a screen reader and does the same thing as tapping.
- The count and percentage update as you go: "31 of 50 states, 62%".
- Optionally give a visit a date and a short note.
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Download or share
Download the map as SVG (editable, scales to any size) or PNG. Both are laid out as a print, with the title, the count and a small wanderlusttracker.com mark, and are drawn in your browser from the same shapes you tapped.
Sharing is off by default. Turn it on and the map gets a link anyone can open as a read-only page with its own preview image. Turn it off and the link stops working.
Where the shapes come from
The idea comes from Wikipedia's blank maps, where every state or county is its own named shape you can colour. These maps do the same thing from public data:
- US states and counties: the us-atlas package, version 3.0.1, derived from US Census Bureau cartographic boundary files. Shapes are keyed by FIPS code.
- Countries: the world-atlas package, version 2.0.2, derived from Natural Earth at 1:50m. Shapes are keyed by ISO numeric code.
The boundary files ship with the site, so nothing is fetched from a third party when you open a map. US maps use the Albers USA projection, which tucks Alaska and Hawaii below the lower 48. The world map uses Equal Earth.
What is stored
Your account (name, email, password hash), your maps (type, title, colour, whether it is shared) and your visits (which regions, plus any date or note). Thumbnails for the My maps page and share previews are rendered in your browser and kept on the server. There are no payments and no ads.