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IE 8 - IP Address Mapping Accelerator

4.00/5 (1 vote)
1 Apr 2009CPOL 15.6K  
On the ASP.NET forums where I moderate, the poster's IP address is displayed at the bottom of the post. Often I am curious and paste the poster's IP address into an IP locator web page to find out where they are posting from. This was tedious.

On the ASP.NET forums where I moderate, the poster's IP address is displayed at the bottom of the post. Often I am curious and paste the poster's IP address into an IP locator web page to find out where they are posting from. This was tedious.

Once I installed Internet Explorer 8 and saw what accelerators could do, I decided to write one to do the work for me. It wasn't too hard.

Here is what the accelerator text looks like (it's just an XML file):

XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<os:openServiceDescription 
   xmlns:os="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
  <os:homepageUrl>http://www.infosniper.net</os:homepageUrl>
  <os:display>
    <os:name>Map IP Address with Info Sniper</os:name>
    <os:icon>http://www.infosniper.net/favicon.ico</os:icon> 
  </os:display>
  <os:activity category="Map">
    <os:activityAction context="selection">
      <os:execute method="get"
       action="http://www.infosniper.net/?ip_address={selection}" />
    </os:activityAction>
  </os:activity>
</os:openServiceDescription>

To install an accelerator, you have to launch it from a web page. This is annoying. I tried to make the URL a local file but that did not work. I ended up with this:

C#
<button id="myButton" 
  onclick="window.external.AddService(
     'http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/stevewellens/Accelerators/InfoSniperAccelerator.xml')">  
  Add InfoSniper Accelerator
</button>

Here is what it looks like in action. Highlight the IP address, right click and…

Here is part of the resulting InfoSniper web page:

Here are some Microsoft's accelerators: http://ie.microsoft.com/activities/en-en/Default.aspx

Here is the Developer's Guide: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc289775(VS.85).aspx

I hope someone finds this useful.

Steve Wellens

[Edit] If you go to my blog, you can install the accelerator from there.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)