Today's Fun with PHP and javascript

Last month I finished figuring out how to do the handwriting block on a web page, so I can capture and save handwriting, e.g. a Model's signature when I'm on the road, like when we sign for packages from UPS/FedEX, or our credit card swipe at Target.

Yesterday, I pursued a favorite type of web programming that involves making Google Maps. I first started making my own Google maps 3 years ago, when I made a map of my DVD customers. Since fulfilling DVD orders is based on shipping to a physical address, having a map is a useful tool.


For this new project, I took my list of IP addresses captured when a viewer comes to (one of) my web pages, and run each through a public GEOIP look up service, that returns the latitude and longitude of an IP address, and plots them all on a Google map!

The first fun result of this, beyond a world map showing each site's viewers and fans, is to see on the map where a Google bot or Bing bot is coming from, and then to click and see the picture of the building!!

Since Google maps is now including some interior photos of places, I also saw the inside of a Starbucks where a viewer surfed in from.

I'm next going to use the Country Code of each IP to politely tell viewers from most countries that I don't ship DVDs to their country.

And then work on blocking pirates and the horrendous number of bots that visit my sites daily - upwards of 40% of my page views are by bots. My first project 9 months ago was to create a table of surfer's origins, and look at their identity to see if they are a bot or not. Which then extends to which Blog they were referred by, or which Search Engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL).

All of this interest started about a year ago when I read that 50% of Internet traffic is non-human! That statement is not all that out of line.

Something that you should ask of all ad and traffic sellers.

I deleted this reply, because it was to the wrong thread.