Weather widget detects visitor's location.

[par]

YoWindow widget is now able to guess the city of your visitor.
The location is detected by IP using http://ipinfodb.com service.

Bad news is that this technique may error.
In certain cases the location detected by IP is not the location of the visitor.
One of my friends works in Saint-Petersburg, but his location detected as a town in Holland, because their company
network infrastructure is there.
Be careful.

To enable this feature you have to substitute location_id variable
with location_auto_ip=1 in flashvars parameter.

This feature is in test mode now.
Because of this, the parameter is not added to the official documentation.

You may check if YoWindow detects your city right on the main page of our site - http://yowindow.com
Don't hesitate to comment on this news to let me know if YoWindow picked your city right.
If it doesn't work, makey sure that http://ipinfodb.com displays the same location.

[ikarus1969]

Hi Pavel!

Detection doesn't work perfect, but i didn't expect that of course.

On the YoWindow website it detects a different city than on the http://ipinfodb.com website, but your city is better

It's the city nearest to the airport (Schwechat, Austria) YoWindow chooses when i set my hometown (Vienna, Austria) in the "old" version.

And, i think it can be used to detect the hemisphere a user is living in as discussed in another thread.

Congrats to this feature!

[par]

Hi!

Can you give me the coordinates ipinfodb displays for Vienna?
This will help me to find out why YoWindow finds another city for these coordinates.

Hi Pavel!

Detection doesn't work perfect, but i didn't expect that of course.

On the YoWindow website it detects a different city than on the http://ipinfodb.com website, but your city is better

It's the city nearest to the airport (Schwechat, Austria) YoWindow chooses when i set my hometown (Vienna, Austria) in the "old" version.

And, i think it can be used to detect the hemisphere a user is living in as discussed in another thread.

Congrats to this feature!

[ikarus1969]

Hi!

Can you give me the coordinates ipinfodb displays for Vienna?
This will help me to find out why YoWindow finds another city for these coordinates.

The result of ipinfodb for my ISP http://www.aon.at/ which is located in Vienna is:

Code: Select all

Your IP address information

[list]
    [*]  IP address : 213.33.99.9
    [*] Country : Austria
    [*] State/Province : Wien
    [*] City : Vienna
    [*] Zip or postal code :
    [*] Latitude : 48.2
    [*] Longitude : 16.3667
    [*] Timezone : 1
    [*] Gmtoffset : 1
    [*] Dstoffset : 2
    [*] Hostname : www.aon.at
[/list]

I hope this helps.

[Holli]

One of my friends works in Saint-Petersburg, but his location detected as a town in Holland, because their company
network infrastructure is there.
Be careful.

Right. In the last months my position is located in northern Germany, nearly 300km from here. This function must be used very careful. If the own position is located good, this doesn't mean that the positions of all visitors are located as well.

[FvE]

Just to let you know it can be right too:

I logged in in 'Mijdrecht' (that is: my IP-adress on that location) and both YoWindow.com and ipinfodb.com were right.

Great!
Thanks for this idea.

[Meerkat]

This does not work for me as my ISP does IP hopping.
One day I'm in Cape Town, another in Pretoria and another day in Johannesburg.

[ikarus1969]

Hi Pavel,

now the ip-based widget shows the right city, Vienna.
(Edit: now i'm in my office in Vienna, so detection is still ok )

One small issue: the copyright line of the widget is displayed in german ("Wettervorhersage von yr.no"), the location name not ("Vienna"; should be "Wien" if taken from the language xml-file).

Below a screenshot which shows on the left the geonames-id-based widget and on the right the ip-based-widget:

YoWindow - 2010-02-08 - gn and ip-based.jpg (87.44 KiB) Viewed 17187 times

[jmcmurry]

Pasha,

The geolocator shows me in Ferryville which is where my ISP has this ip range registered. YoWindow shows LaCrosse which is probably the closest METAR to that. They are both approx 75 miles southwest and west of my town. I think it's nice that when I visit the YoWindow page it shows me something fairly close rather than New York city, but this won't replace user configuration I think.

- Jim

[par]

OK, thank you guys, now I got the picture

Reinhart, we don't have local names for locations yet, location name should always be displayed in English.
Unless you owerwritten it with flashvars parameter.
So it is a not implemented feature rather than an error.

Thanks for the data!