Why did I make these pages? Simple, I wanted to updated my IP address for my home PC at Dyndns.org whenever my ISP kindly changed it (Don't you just love DHCP sometimes).

I tried a couple of the free clients and wasn't impressed at all, I'm also a tight arse and didn't want to pay for some very ordinary client, so I thought about writing my own client. As I am not a programmer I took the easy way out and used a kix script (See here if your interested).

The first thing I needed was a reference to find my external IP address, I found a few like www.ipchicken.com, www.whatismyip.com, or www.whatsmyip.org but they all had a bunch of shit that was nice for the eye ball but annoying to sift through for scripting. I found what I wanted at checkip.dyndns.org a nice clean output of my IP but they don't like you using it too much. Here's an extract from www.dyndns.org/support/faq.html#80 Quote: "We ask that you not check against this page more than once every 10 minutes. Anyone hitting it more frequently than that is liable to become blocked from using the checkip service. We provide no guarantees regarding the checkip service, and it should be used at your own risk."

As I have the darkpaws domain working quietly away I thought I may as well setup my own page with the info I wanted. This I did with whatip.darkpaws.com/textip.php. I then thought I may as well keep playing around with the simple side of PHP and made the main graphical page that brought you here.