All around the world?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-08-03 10:02:40 - Graham EllisCan you guess what the following have in common?
| Oregon, United States | Beijing, China |
| Madhya Pradesh, India | Western, Sri Lanka |
| Korea, Republic of | Zuid-Holland, Netherlands |
| Gauteng, South Africa | Brazil |
| Region Metropolitana, Chile | Victoria, Australia |
| Makkah, Saudi Arabia | Dubai, United Arab Emirates |
| T'ai-pei, Taiwan | India |
| Perak, Malaysia | California, United States |
| Ireland | London, City of, United Kingdom |
| Milton Keynes, United Kingdom | Wiltshire, United Kingdom |
| Noord-Holland, Netherlands | Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Belgium |
| Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany | Bucuresti, Romania |
We've had visitors to our web site in the last five minutes (or rather the five minutes from 09:35) from IP addresses in all these places. (And I have excluded know robots too!)
For a considerable time, we have used the Maxmind database (http://www.maxmind.com/) to identify the country from which visitors arrive on our site - this allows us to tailor our phone number for their use, add the words "UK" prominently onto course descriptions, and make other subtle alterations along the same lines. However, our new server has more "Umph" and as well as getting an enormously better performance, we're able to use Maxmind's bigger regional database now, and get more granularity in our geolocation.
Using our recent visitors page, we can even watch visitors as they arrive at our site - we can see the search terms they have used if they're a new arrival from Yahoo or Google, and we can see how they follow through. This is superb marketing feedback - and we keep the logs too so that we can come up with a longer term analysis as well. As you might expect, on a Sunday August morning our site isn't at its busiest, and you'll see a predominance of Asian visitors. The USA sleeps (except for one late bird in California) and Europe is enjoying its lie in on Sunday morning.