Conditional Hyperlinks
The premise here is to have external links that are only available to me and are hidden for everyone else.
The design theory is that a check of the IP address that I am currently assigned is the same as one that I have previously stored, then the links will be hidden.
As I develop my pages off-line mearly checking to see if I am online is not sufficient even though I am accessing the HTML from a local source and not the webserver. I am okay to have the hyperlinks hidden if the page is accessed from the server even if it is me although if I can get this to work then the same logic would apply.
Using AI I have found a way to return my current IP address to the webpage that is being viewed. At the time of writing this the IP address is echoed to the console. I also admit that I don't currently understand how this works.
My IP address at the time of starting this page is 168.86.204.58. I need to develop a function to write this IP address to a file on the server.
The conditional link will only display if the IP address is the same as that retrieved from the file.
The two buttons below just change the text of the link. I need to add a w3-hide to the link(s)
Using ipify to get my current IP address
This is uncannily easy. At the moment I admit that I am not sure how this works. My page on the ipify API will try and expand on this.
The code was taken from the API's website and it consists of a script that makes a function call to the API passing a parameter that is presumably a JSON object.
The Philosophy of this method
I have spent a lot of time developing methods to display links to other pages on the Internet. This has had some downsides in that a straight hyperlink provides a visitor to leave this website never to return. I have toyed with ways to control this with mixed success.
Ideally I would like to have a method by which I can place "research links" on pages that are only visible to me. This way I can be assured that a visitor is not just using me as a "look-up" service. At the same time I can continue to place the links in a similar way as I do now so that they cannot be clicked but give the visitor enough information to access the source of the information that I am either quoting or using to make the point on a particular page.
Current IP is stored in ip.txt - need a PHP to update this should the IP change.
IP address can be "fetched" from ip.txt if the page is loaded from the server. If the current IP matches the stored IP then the research link is hidden. If the page is loaded locally then the Fetch will not run and the stored IP will not be retrieved so the research link will always be seen.