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Tags: technical perl javascript api google programming Geolocating the site's visitors
I'll admit 
, it became a bit of an obsession to see where my visitors were coming from to this new site. So I set out on what turned out to be a bit of an arduous journey to locate a database/web services that will geolocate my visitor's IP address. I initially started off in a state of disbelief when I found out that there are vendors out there actually selling this data for insane amount of money (upwards of thousands). I also looked at http://www.hostip.info/, but their web service just wasn't all that reliable .
Enter: maxmind, even though they are a commercial entity, they were generous enough to make a lite version of their GeoIP City database freely available. As per what they said about it:
Approximately 97% on a country level and 60% on a city level for the US within a 25 mile radius.
They have APIs for various languages, I used the one for Perl (you must compile and install a native C library for the perl module to work with that). I was really impressed by the performance. Now armed with the all the city, country, long/lat coordinates of my visitor's IP addresses (or atleast 97% of them) here's a final product of it using Google Maps that shows geolocations of my site's recent visitors. Click here.
Cheers!
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