I am working on a website application where it is necessary to know the location of a user when he/she posts. What would be the best method, using PHP, to determine where (general location) the user is posting from? I know you can use the user's ip with various services offered, but I am looking for something that works with users using our mobile site as well.
maybe use the browsers inbult geolocation tools? eg:
http://www.digimantra.com/howto/current-location-iphone-safari-firefox-browser/
then just parse the javascript info into your php variables?
Most sites use Accept-Language request header with $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']. If request IP also matches the language, you can be pretty sure it's the right country.
There are libraries that you can use to lookup the users location via their IP Address like http://www.geoplugin.com/webservices/php
Related
The only way I know is to get the IP of user and check which country is it belong to by using some api at the start of the page from php. And then, redirect it.
So, I'm wondering is there any other better redirection way to do it. Such as from .htaccess?
And is there ways to figure out the country code of the user's ip without 3rd party webservice?
you can use GeoIP in order to find the IP location and then you can filter an deny the access.
the IP address can be found with $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']
Reference: http://php.net/manual/en/book.geoip.php
note: make sure you read the installation section, cause it's not a default module
It would be useful if, when placing an order or submitting a form, we could reliably include the visitor's referrer with the request. This is not always simple because, for example, the user could have found us via Adwords, left the site and come back by typing in the address. In this case, we would want to know the Adwords campaign for this specific visitor. Google Events don't fit well with our workflow.
Other questions have tried to use Javascript and apparently that is not possible. I noticed that Google sets a _ga cookie which we can read - it gives us an ID that looks like this: GA1.2.123456789.1234567890. Can we use PHP to extract the referrer according to Google from that ID?
Not in realtime, no. It used to be possible with the previous version of GA which evaluated traffic sources clientside and stored the values in a cookie. However with Universal Analytics the processing is now done serverside and the information is not accessible in realtime (there is a realtime API but that'S for various reasons not feasible for getting data on individual users).
It is however possible to get the referrer data via javascript - you look at document.referer and (if the referrer domain is different from your own domain) store it into a cookie (since the question is tagged with PHP, you can do the same with $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']).
This will not exactly match Googles info (Google will show referrals from google properties, yahoo, bing etc. not as referrer but as organic search traffic) but should be close enough.
Now we are using standard google analytics script dc.js to create utm-cookies by http referrer and http url of the visitor. Now google stops creating utm-cookies since Universal Analytics.
Is there any way to mimic utm-cookie creation logic by referer and url using internal or external solution?
PS. Please, don't advise to get rid of utm-cookies. The main question is: "is it possible to create cookies by the same logic which google does?"
That is not realy easy. You can use the PHP function $_SERVER ['HTTP_REFERER'] but:
The address of the page (if any) which referred the user agent to the
current page. This is set by the user agent. Not all user agents will
set this, and some provide the ability to modify HTTP_REFERER as a
feature. In short, it cannot really be trusted.
As far as I know, the Universal Analytics HAS a way of tracking referrals using _ga cookies and it works very nice. If you work with PHP (hosted GA), then you will have problems but with JavaScript woks fine.
If you whant to follow AND _utm cookies with javascript, you need to create some "push" script what will collect that data but I think Universal Analytic have that option automaticly.
Read THIS blog please.
I'm trying to detect the CNAME used on incoming traffic so I can customize a site accordingly. I have a site that displays some info to the client (actually more complicated, but will work for an example). Some of my customers send their own customers to my site to see this info. They are using a CNAME to get to my site. I would like to display certain logos etc to the viewer based on what CNAME was used to get to my page.
What I have come up with so far is using dns_get_record, I'm I on the right track with that if it can be done at all?
Thanks for any help!
It depends on the language that your web content is written in, it also depends on what webserver you are using. What you want to look for in the web content is the "HOST header". If you want to treat it differently at the web server then what you want to look for is "virtual hosts".
Im making a social network and im trying to implement this feature where if the user is logged in from a different machine it will ask him to type in the password or identify his friends like in facebook.
I can do this using IP checks but that would be stupid if if the user had dynamic ip adress, then another option is cookies but that would also be stupid for many reasons - one being that its client side.
So then, i think mac address will be the thing to use, but i have no idea how to grab the mac address using php or javascript.
I think if this is possible, then it will be via js because it is client side
So any suggestions?
Why is it 'stupid' to use client-side information for authentication, that's where you'll be getting the username and password from and you're likely trusting that already
There is no way to grab the user's MAC address unless you're on the same network and the network allows such a lookup using ARP
You'll likely have to use cookies for this, and just make sure not to clear them if a particular browser is 'trusted'. If you think users are likely to share cookies with each other along with their username and password you could encode some other browser specific fields (exact UA header?) into the cookie to add more data you can use to decide if the client is trusted
That's more a comment than an answer:
Im making a social network and im trying to implement this feature where if the user is logged in from a different machine it will ask him to type in the password or identify his friends like in facebook.
I'm not the author of that feature from facebook, so I don't have the specification of that feature at hand. If you would be so kind and add the specification of the feature you ask a question about to your question, it's probably possible to answer your question profoundly.
I have come up with a solution
I can use this api http://ipinfodb.com/ip_location_api.php And grab the location of my users and if it changes ask them to verify device.