Checking it's me

My requirement here is that having found a way to shim my external links it would be nice if I could access them myself at the same time of blocking other visitors.

Looking online I came across a way of using the navigator object, however there are situations (in apps) where the consistent connection to the Internet is required to be known. Mearly checking at the start of an operation or transaction is not enough. In any case a webpage would not load if you are not connected so the chech using the navigator object is not sufficient.

The technique described by Dave Grey uses the Fetch() API to retrieve data from the server asynchronously by accessing a small image file on the server.

The checkIP function will always return false if I am not connected to the Internet. I also want it to return false if the retrieved text is my current IP address.

My ip Address

The Structure of External links

The problem with having extenal links is that a visitor will click on them and not return. While this may well be the reason that my pages were found, i.e. to find out more about a subject and to find supporting references.

The links were primarily placed so that I could look-up these supporting references without having to search for the subject again. So of these references are easy to find but some have taken me many clicks to find and they may well be more interesting than the pages that I have authored from that information.

Citing a reference by its URL is fine but it that URL is an actual external link there is a potential problem. Most Interner users will be aware that http: and https: is a link, also text that is underlined is also assumed to be a link. The http: link, if not an actual hyperlink, would have to be copied an pasted to the browser address bar. This is not likely as most visitors are probably using a mobile device.