Less is more
Every once in a while, I resort to one of the many “what’s my IP” type websites to lookup which external IP address I’m currently using. These sites have their uses for both professional, as well as personal purposes. Many of these sites provide a lot more information than I’m really after. In the end, I only want to see my current external IP address.
All the well intended, but known, technical and geo-location info presented by the numerous “what is my IP” sites tends to draw away attention from what you’re after and it doesn’t really play well with tools like ‘curl’ or ‘wget’.
There used to be a simple site I used, which just returned just your IP address located at http://www.whatismyip.org/, but this one also grew a lot of fat. Yesterday, I once again found myself looking for an external IP address, on a server with ‘curl’ and ‘wget’, and decided it was time I rolled what I was looking for myself. This turned into an extremely simple mod_python based scriptlet, which provides a no frills “What’s My IP” service, returning nothing more than a “text/plain” response with your current IP address.
This service is running on my recently upgraded employee rack server at Schuberg Philis at http://ip.yppy.eu/. For me it provided useful and I hope other people also find this ‘less is more’ service of use. And yes, I will keep it clutter free.