Sunday, February 24, 2008

Trace Any IP

I've mentioned before that I love seeing where all the visitors to my blog come from. The Internet makes the world such a small place. There are some neat tools that make it easy to learn all kinds of things about my visitors. That's right, you can't hide! Actually, you can, but I'm not going to tell you how.

A page I haven't used for a while is WhatIsMyIPAddress.com. Here you can look up an IP address and find out details such as:
  • Geographic region location (also called geoip location)
  • Country, State, and City
  • Postal Code
  • Area Code
  • Latitude & Longitude
  • Map of IP address location* with clickable push pin
Sometimes you need to know your IP address, and this is the page to find it. Also, we used to use this for church when people would join our cybercast but not our chat room. The server would give us the IP address of the people who joined the cybercast, and we could look them up and see where they were listening from. Even if they didn't say anything, we could have a good idea who it was listening in, provided it was someone we already knew. Otherwise it was just neat to know that someone in California was listening and maybe someone in England or Alaska. This can also come in handy if your blog, web page, or forum tracks visitor's IP addresses.

If all you have is a visitor's IP, you can find out where they are from and even trace ip to see the route the information traveled through the Internet. Since I didn't have anyone else's IP to trace and the site automatically filled mine in, I just tried tracing my own. It tracked me all the way from Irvine, CA to Tulsa, OK to Denver, CO to a couple places in Wisconsin before finding me right here in Eagle. They even offer a visual representation of the trace on a map. It's really interesting to see how information travels across the Internet, and it's not in a straight line. Is it any wonder I can't keep track of where I've been?

3 comments:

  1. Good Monday morning to you Anna....well is there anything good about Monday lol

    anyway I just wanted to say hello
    carrie

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have an award for you on my jabber jaws blog.
    carrie~

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Anna, its cool that my ad is finally running on your page. I'm from Northern Calif. real close to Lassen Park and Redding areas. Hope you have a fantastic day !!!

    ReplyDelete

I love your comments! Keep them coming.