Know Your Public IP Address Anytime

Have you ever needed to give someone your public IP address, but can't remember what it is? I'm not talking about your computer's private IP address, but the one your ISP assigns to you (and probably changes every week or so). There are a number of ways to get this information, including lots of web sites. One day it occurred to me that it should be pretty easy to script the call to one of these web sites and put the output inside a small gadget on my Vista sidebar. So that's exactly what I did.

Using it is simple. Download the .gadget file and then double click it to install it.There are no options and nothing to configure. If you have an active internet connection, it will go out, find your IP address and display it for you. It only checks your IP address once, when you first start it up. If you ever want it go out and check again, simply click the little refresh icon next to the IP address (looks like two circular arrows). That's all there is to it.

No, it isn't fancy, but it's a great example of how simple it can be to program a Vista Sidebar Gadget.It's free to download. Take it, use it, play with it, modify it, whatever you want to do. In case you don't know, a .gadget file is really just a zip file. If you give it a .zip extension, you can unzip it and see what makes it tick.

Download the IP Gadget Here