Ask HN: any service that can send requests to a URL from a specified city?

Posted by no4clipper on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:02PM
from the ask-hn dept.

Basically I'm trying to test a feature of my website, which displays the location(city-level) you're at when visiting my site. And the testing approach I'm planning is: using a host in an arbitrary city to send requests to my site, with the city name appended to the URL, and then compare the known city name with the city name calculated by my site.

This approach needs a service that, given an arbitrary city name and a URL, it asks a host in that city to send requests to that URL.

Does such service/tool/library actually exist? Or is there a better testing approach for that feature?

( 4 comments | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: any service that can send requests to a URL from ... by masonhensley on Thursday January 05, 2012 @09:35PM (#3431672)

I just started playing around with Geocoder on a side project. I'm still a little confused as to exactly how you are trying to implement this, but if you are working in ruby, it may help you get started.

Tutorial: http://railscasts.com/episodes/273-geocoder?view=asciicast

Geocoder Gem: http://www.rubygeocoder.com/

Good luck.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: any service that can send requests to a URL from ... by cultureulterior on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:39PM (#3431346)

Do you need to test this in more than, say, 5 cities? If not, why not get 1 month of 5 of the cheapest vps's you can find, and proxy via them.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: any service that can send requests to a URL from ... by francoisdevlin on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:03PM (#3431231)

Have you tried spoofing the http request?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: any service that can send requests to a URL from ... by samlev on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:40PM (#3431349)

That would still involve knowing an IP address that the GeoIP database would associate with a particular city.

@no4clipper: If it doesn't matter WHICH city (so long as it's a different one, and you can independently verify that that city is correct), then I'd be more than happy to click on a link or two and take some screen shots for you.

[ Parent | on HN ]