If you follow me on Twitter, then you know that I was a little upset last week with regard to one of my little side projects, ip2loc, which provides simple IP address to geographic location translation via a Google Map.

The full story isn’t very interesting, but let’s just say that a few unrighteous souls took advantage of the free service that I offered and ruined the fun for everyone.

In my frustration, I replaced the lookup form with a “this is why we can’t have nice things” message and announced the service’s retirement on Twitter.

(I just looked and my ip2loc announcement blog post was in July of 2008. That’s a long time ago!)

But

So many folks reached out to say thanks, offer assistance, and tell me how often they use the tool that I decided to bring it back to life.

Compromises

In order to resurrect the service, I had to switch away from the paid MaxMind web service that was powering it. This is worse in a few ways:

1. Accuracy suffers because the database is updated monthly instead of in realtime

2. It no longer displays ISP information for each IP

3. There is now a PayPal donate button for those who really appreciate the tool

All in all I think these deficincies are worth suffering to keep the service online. Rarely a week goes by that I don’t run a lookup myself, so I am happy to be able to bring it back.