Do You Know Your IP Address?

This can be a really bewildering question to some people. Your IP address is basically your computer's identity on the internet. It's a number assigned by your ISP.

I'm not a big fan of sites that log and display their visitor's IP addresses to the public. Let's not make a hacker's life easy, folks! And as a private, slightly paranoid person, I'm not crazy about sites/blogs that glean my location from my IP address and log that publicly, either. But behind the scenes, for the webmaster him-/herself, IP addresses and other information can provide great insight into how to serve their visitors better.

IP2Location is a company that offers IP Address Tools for this. They're just simple HTML snippets that you put on your page(s), but they're very powerful. By looking up a visitor's IP address, their tools can reverse translate it to the visitor's country, region/state, and city; their latitude & longitude; their Zip code; time zone; name of their ISP, Net Speed, and domain name. The newest packages (DB15-DB18) now also include the visitors' IDD/area code (U.S. only) and even their local weather station name/code. With this information, you can create a wealth of personalized content to your visitors, like local news feeds, weather forecasts, and much more.

They've got live demos of some of these tools over at their website. Plug an IP address into this one and see what I mean!