Welcome to the first of its kind, USA maps of baby names! Each state is colored according to the popularity of the name (lighter is more popular and darker is less popular). You can instantly see why some names which are so high of the list for the USA are actually kind of low in your region (or visa versa).

Here's a link for "Emily" where lighter is more popular and darker is less popular.

When I was thinking about building this website, I took a side trip and made a new mysql client, based upon psh (Perl Shell).

Here is the source code, hosted at code.google.com:
http://code.google.com/p/psh-mysql-client/

The default MySQL client is nice, but I wanted to add some features to it, like command aliases. I also wanted to be able to be in my normal shell and quickly grab stuff from a MySQL table without switching terminals. So, I wrote a couple extensions to the psh (Perl Shell).

Two new commands are "dls" and "dhead". Screenshots below

What are the most popular bay girl names? That sounds like a simple question, but like most things, there are a lot of nuances: what year or range of years? should spelling variants or similar sounding names be ignored or merged? what part of the world? what part of the USA? what ethnicity or race? You might have obvious answers to these questions, but your answers might be different than someone else's.

This website currently aims to merge similar names into clusters while sorting by rank. As an example, here is a list of the most popular baby girl names with a "medium" amount of clustering. Thus, the top ten baby girl names (averaged since 1880, with a strong emphasis on recent years) and clustered "medium" is:

1. Emily: Emelia, Emelie, Emilia, Emilie, Emily
2. Emma: Em, Emmie, Emmy
3. Madison: Maddison
4. Isabella: Isabel, Isabelle
5. Ava: Ev, Eva, Eve, Evie, Evy
6. Alexis: Aleksey, Alexa, Alexandra, Alexandria, Alexina, Alexine, Alix
7. Abigail: Abagail, Abigale, Abigayle
8. Sophia: Sofi, Sofia, Sofie, Sophie, Sophy
9. Hannah: Hana, Hanna
10. Olivia: Olive, Olivya, Olva

However, if the clustering is very lenient with lots of names similar to the main name, then the top 10 list changes to look like this:

(Disclaimer: this is not medical advice, it is merely a list of infant medicines which your doctor may advise you to use. Every baby is different. please consult a pediatrician with any health concerns)

My sister just had a baby and while she was still pregnant, she asked me what drugs besides Syrup of Ipecac she should have ready to give the baby. My first response was "THROW AWAY your syrup of ipecac." Unlike when we were kids, it is no longer recommended that ipecac be kept at home or even used under most conditions (also, a newborn is not going to be crawling around getting into trouble under the kitchen sink quite yet).

Other than that, babies under 6 months should generally NOT be given any drugs without consulting his or her pediatrician. Once you (the new parent) learns from the doctor how and when to give drugs like Tylenol, then you might end up making the decision on your own if the baby is older than 6 months. But, in nearly all cases you will want to talk to the doctor before (or soon after) giving drugs. The medicines listed here are handy to have in case it is in middle of the night and the on-call nurse or doctor advises you to give the drug.

Baby Name Clusters has been on the air for about 3 months. My goal is to have more people finding and using the website, and we are making progress in some areas, but not much progress in terms of traffic, shown here:

When our first baby showed up, we were not ready. The room wasn't ready, we didn't have the right supplies, we hadn't picked a name and we were not mentally prepared. The main goal of this website is to help you pick a baby name, but it seems like some general advice/ideas would be helpful, too.

Here are some future topics. I will activate these links as the pages get written.

• Picking a baby name
• Medicine you should have in your home
• Sleep (baby and parents)
• Diaper advice
• Postpartum moods
• Nursing

Do you have any other suggestions? Please comment below.

Also, you may have found out that everybody has advice for you - whether they tell you or not. The most important thing is for you to trust your instincts (assuming you are a good person). But, the second most important thing is to keep an open mind and be receptive to others (your partner, your kid, your peers, and some experts). Billions of people have done this before you, so be prepared to do some learning - it can be a wild ride.

The person who started Baby Names Map has commented on this site and linked to this website and I have been getting a fair bit of traffic from his blog and his website. I am grateful for his mentioning my site and it serves as a constant reminder to me that my site is very USA-centric. The main reason for this was to stay focused and get something up and running. Also, the US Social Security Administration site has over 100 years of name popularity information, which is a rich source of data (508,000 data points for 14,722 first names).

Despite the abundance of data from the SSA, I feel like I should add name popularity information from other countries into my website, since I can already see in my logs that I am getting some international visitors (UK and Canada for now). It would be fun to have some interactive maps or just be able to switch countries in order to view the rankings and historical graphs. I'll put it on my to-do list!

I have found two additional baby name websites to add to my review of the best baby name websites: The Right Baby Name and Baby Name Addicts. The Each site has some unique features. The Right Baby Name has a very ineresting report and analysis for each baby name, and the Addicts site has a very large database of names, many added from the strong user base.

Like I noted elsewhere, the reason I started this website was because many of the baby name websites that I found were presenting the same data in boring, ad-filled pages. One of the least inspiring ways to browse names is alphabetically in a long list since there is no context for popularity of names or name relatedness. Many sites offered no passion for the names or interest in looking at it in different ways... they were cluttered, slow and difficult to navigate.

I have written a review of what I think are some GOOD baby name websites. This is my review of the underperformers (who show up very high in Google search rankings)

To get a list of these "bad" sites, just go to Google and search for "baby names," then all the sites in the first couple pages which I did not mention in my review of good websites are the set of not-great websites. I am only slightly kidding.

Here is a mini-review for the top 20 links of a "baby names" Google search results (as of June 30, 2008):