[WEB4LIB] IP Address Detection

[Thomas Dowling]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald Barclay" <dbarclay at library.tmc.edu>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 4:45 PM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] IP Address Detection


> Anyone know of a quick, cheap, and good way to detect a site visitor's
IP
> address and, based on this, direct them to a particular page on your
site?
>

As others have made clear, there's no decent server-side technology that
*couldn't* do this, so you just need to decide what technology is the best
fit for your server environment.

If your need is really a "this page for on-campus, that page for
off-campus" arrangement, let me suggest an alternative.  I'd create one
dynamic page that displays the appropriate content for either group of
users.  Consider: you have two sets of directions for accessing databases;
I'm on campus; I search in Google for this page; Google's crawler will
have come from off-campus, and will display to me the URL for the
off-campus directions.  Contrariwise, if I receive e-mail from an
off-campus friend asking for those directions, I'll probably end up
sending him the on-campus URL.  If both logical pages live at the same
URL, both these problems are avoided.  Again, any decent server-side
scripting environment will handle this.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu