Simon Willison’s Weblog

geoIP

6th September 2002

Adrian Holovaty in a blogite thread about features that can be added to blogs:

Change the time zone. I’ve noticed a lot of blogs don’t specify which time zone they’re in, which pretty much makes the timestamp meaningless. I put “EST” on mine, and my about page explains my time zone further, but I think it would be convenient for the users to convert the times to their own zones. I did this in JavaScript on one of my old sites, but I’d rather do it on the server side for accessibility’s sake.

This got me thinking about how best to “guess” a user’s timezone. A search on Google for “country ip address” turned up GeoIP, an impressive looking open-source based database for looking up countries by IP address. The database updated yearly is free, while monthly updates can be had for a very reasonable $150 annual subscription.