Monday 13 January 2014

Country of Origin

Sometimes, when debugging client-side errors, knowing where the user is from can be useful. For example, I recently had a situation where I had debug an error that only occurred for users behind the Great Firewall of China. Granted these kinds of issues only crop up rarely, but at such times knowing that this error only occurs in certain geographical locations can be immensely useful when trying to debug.

Errorception now displays the country of origin of the error occurrence, whenever possible. Due the very nature of IP-address-based geo-location, the location accuracy can only be very coarse-grained, and might even be entirely wrong, but is right most of the time. Also, I only started collecting geo-data over the weekend, so older error occurrences will not have geo data tagged along with it.

Happy debugging!

3 comments:

  1. Why not just log the IP address? That way it can be correlated with other web logs.

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    Replies
    1. Noted. I'll look to add IPs to the logs soon. Thanks!

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  2. Can you start showing the actual IP address as well?

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