Services-services-services! Enough already! Today I introduce my Whois and Enhanced Whois Web Service.
The Enhanced Whois web service lets me know where my visitor are geographically located, provides filtering capabilities, and can act on referrals. This will allow me (or you) to personalize site greetings, hide my email address (or content) based on the visitor, and provide a unique personal experience. Alternately I can use this service as a classic Whois service.
How it works.
We're not anonymous on the internet and IP addresses are what uniquely defines your internet existence. Whois services let us determine the registrant of internet resources.
Using my Whois service you can:
View your enhanced whois record.
By the visitor's IP address (your IP) URI:
http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois/enhanced.{xml|json}
Example:
Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois/enhanced.xml
Response (using my IP):
<WhoisEnhancedRecord xmlns="http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<City>Calgary</City>
<Country>Canada</Country>
<FilterMatches i:nil="true"/>
<FriendlyMatches i:nil="true"/>
<IsFilterMatch>false</IsFilterMatch>
<IsFriendly>false</IsFriendly>
<Organization>Shaw Communications Inc.</Organization>
<StateProvince>AB</StateProvince>
</WhoisEnhancedRecord>
By the visitor's IP address specifying a referrer, and a filter URI:
http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois/enhanced.{xml|json}?filters={filters,filters,...}&referrer={referrer}
Example:
Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois/enhanced/xml?filters=CA&referrer=Twitter
Response (from an IP owned by Google, with a filter for California, and a referrer of Twitter specified):
<WhoisEnhancedRecord xmlns="http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<City>Mountain View</City>
<Country>United states</Country>
<FilterMatches>
<string>StateProvince</string>
</FilterMatches>
<FriendlyMatches>
<string>google</string>
<string>twitter</string>
</FriendlyMatches>
<IsFilterMatch>true</IsFilterMatch>
<IsFriendly>true</IsFriendly>
<Organization>Google Inc.</Organization>
<StateProvince>CA</StateProvince>
</WhoisEnhancedRecord>
View your classic Whois record.
By the visitor's IP address (your IP) URI:
http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois.{xml|json}
Example:
Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois.xml
Response (using my IP):
<WhoisRecord xmlns="http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<DomainName>68.146.10.100</DomainName>
<RegistryData>
<AbuseContact> ... </AbuseContact>
<AdministrativeContact i:nil="true"/>
<BillingContact i:nil="true"/>
<CreatedDate>2002-06-03</CreatedDate>
<RawText> ... </RawText>
<Registrant>
<Address>Suite 800630 - 3rd Ave. SW</Address>
<City>Calgary</City>
<Country>CA</Country>
<Name>Shaw Communications Inc.</Name>
<PostalCode>T2P-4L4</PostalCode>
<StateProv>AB</StateProv>
</Registrant>
...
</WhoisRecord>
So... why is this useful?
This is the first step for this site's personalization - if I know where the user came from, where the user is geographically located, and have the capabilities to filter their Whois responses, then I can tailor my content to the user. For example: if someone from Google landed on my site I could mention that I'd love to work there and provide my email address and phone number, similarly if someone from Calgary landed on my site I could provide my public calendar of local events. The possibilities are endless.
This service will be wrapped by a JavaScript widget that will take care of the asynchronous service polling, but that sounds like another post.
Contribute, view, or download the openly available source code here.
