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I'm currently in the early stages of creating a new website and want to be able to match my content to the visitors geographical location. This site is going to turn into the biggest project I've attempted and I certainly haven't tried to figure this out before so I was a little stuck.

I've done a bit of research and come up with three alternatives and just wanted to know if anyone else had attempted to tackle a similar problem, and if so hopefully point me in the best direction.

SmartGeek

This works by supplying the ip you're interested in to the smartgeek server as a get variable in a url. The file returned contains information on the location in the meta tags. This looks ok but you're reliant on their server meaning serving my pages may be slowed. I know it'll only be once for each visitor (I can then store the location in session variables or cookies) but I'm not sure if I want to go down this route.

www.tutorialized.com - Tutorial

I like this better. The tutorial walks you through querying a database that you can download to your own site from here. The data is on your own server so it should be faster. Probably need to update the database from time to time but assuming the quality of the data is similar to the smartgeek approach this looks a lot better.

There is also traceroute (I'm using PHP so perhaps thePEAR packages PEAR package?) but this is only half the story so I'm not sure about this. Having done a traceroute on my ip I wouldn't know how to convert that into a geographical location.

If anyone else has attempted this or knows or other/more/better resources I would be very interested.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3136, old post ID:25632

your best bet is probably that last thing you mentioned with the database. You'd just have to set a cron job to regularly download and sync it. Doing a whois on each new visitor would work too, but you'd have to find a whois server that allows automatic queries. Hope it goes well, good luck!

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3136, old post ID:25633

Another service similar to the SmartGeeks site

Another one using a database on your own site

Accessing the information on your own server definitely makes more sense. The problem though is how accurate is the information. Looking at the forum for the first downloadable database there seemed to be a lot of errors in it. I think all I can hope for is a best guess.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3136, old post ID:25635

Yeah it's not easly to geographicly locate IPs. some have the town name in the tracert routers, some don't. So it's not that easy. I'm not sure what neotrace uses to find out,since that's a program that can tell geographic locations of IPs. Though I've seen it do mistakes, such as say that I'm in NY when I'm like super far from there, in Canada

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3136, old post ID:25638

Are you sure you care about geographic location that much? Is locale information good enough?

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3136, old post ID:25644

I've not come across neotrace, I'll take a look.

Cold Drink, I'm not sure whats the difference between geographic location and locale information. In terms of how specific it needs to be just the country would be sufficient.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3136, old post ID:25652

Streety wrote: I've not come across neotrace, I'll take a look.

Cold Drink, I'm not sure whats the difference between geographic location and locale information. In terms of how specific it needs to be just the country would be sufficient.

I guess not then Locale informaiton is more language oriented. If you care to make a difference between Ireland and Scottland, then you would certianly need that Geo info. But if you just care that the language is English with Great Brittian formats and spelling, that's different. That's locale information.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3136, old post ID:25655

I understand now.

Unfortunately you're right, I need a little bit more.

There are a couple of packages in the PEAR repository that supposedly meet my requirements but one doesn't seem to have a distribution and the other uses a database that hasn't been updated for several years.

That NeoTrace program is a lot of fun. It's always interesting when you find that websites you frequently visit or you in fact own aren't in the countries you at first thought.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3136, old post ID:25656