I occasionally wish to know the IP address of my home Cable Modem or DSL connection but don't really care if it's available in DNS or not. It occurred to me that if I could programmatically detect the IP change, I'd be able to notify myself via Twitter.
At first, I wanted a simple web service that'd tell me my IP address--something like WhatIsMyIP.com but an API suitable for simple scripting.
Not finding anything, I created this massive PHP script instead and hosted it on my server:
That made it easy to write a simple bash shell script that can be run from cron every few minutes. It uses curl to hit that script and compares the result with the previous result (stored in ~/.last_ip). If they differ it updates the file and tells twitter, again using curl.
Of course, I had to create that new twitter account and then follow it in my main account. But, hey, that wasn't so hard. Now I have a Web 2.0ish social dynamic DNS thingy that uses Twitter.
Aren't I cool and buzzword compliant?!
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