If you’re running a website that provides a service, it’s likely that it would be beneficial to know a user’s location (or have a rough idea) so that the content could be tailored to their specific geographic area. But how do you get their location, without having to ask them? By using their IP address, it’s possibly to determine their general area with fairly good accuracy. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to do that using the free IP address geolocation database from IPInfoDB.

Continued

If you’re like me, you run your WordPress installation off of a SVN checkout, making it far easier to stay up to date with new versions. In fact, using version control checkouts is an excellent way to maintain web applications running on production servers, especially if they don’t require compilation.

However, if you recently tried to upgrade to the latest version using the instructions at the WordPress Codex, you likely ran into a problem with an error mesage like this:

$ svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8/ .
svn: 'http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8/'
is not the same repository as
'http://svn.automattic.com'

This is because sometime between the release of 2.7.1 and 2.8, the URL of the WordPress SVN repository changed from http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/ to http://core.svn.wordpress.org/.

Continued

As reported a little while ago, Sun plans to launch their own app store for Java-based desktop applications. With Apple’s App Store having passed the one-billion download mark last month and thus proving to be a roaring success, it’s clear that Sun, like many others, is hoping to imitate and perhaps improve on the effort. But does it make sense?

Continued