Alon Schreibman's blog

Many websites use Geo-Locating services to provide location aware content, so users will get the content in their language and currency, and will "enjoy" from some targeted adverts.
Geo-location is also required when providing content that is protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management) and has some geographical constraints.
On top of that, webmasters can benefit from Geo-Locating logs to analysis their web traffic.

This article explains how to build your own GeoLocating solution by translating IP address to Country.
At the end of this article, I'll show an example of simple Java implementation of IP-to-Country Geo-Locating tool.

I just installed from scratch PHP5 (PHP version 5) to run with MySQL and Apache HTTP server. Despite the popularity of this configuration, I spent few hours straggling to set it up. The main reason it was not straight forward is that most of the “how-to” articles I found on the net were not up-to-date and just didn’t work with the latest version of Apache, PHP and MySQL.

Nowadays, most of the low cost hosting packages come with PHP and MySQL. PHP became very popular, with many free scripts available to download, and writing new PHP scripts is a fast and easy way to build dynamic and stable web sites.

Installing PHP on your local machine makes testing your PHP scripts much easier.
Save time on debugging, without the need of uploading your test files to the server for every minor change you’ve done on your test scripts.