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

[no4clipper]

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?

[masonhensley]

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.

[cultureulterior]

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.

[francoisdevlin]

Have you tried spoofing the http request?

[samlev]

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.