I have been an almost-daily user of lookupCrap.com, and I have previously written a short review about it almost 5 months ago. Since then, Josh of lookupCrap.com contacted me about their update, so I think I shall write another short review about it.

The new site went live in mid-December, and it was quite a major update. Here are some that I have observed.

• A much better looking site. I wish I have some design skill.
• The whole site is yelling “Ajax! Ajax! Ajax!” at me. It uses prototype + script.aculo.us.
• Yahoo maps has been replaced by Google Maps.
• Many more functions are now built-in, like WHOIS, traceroute, etc, without going to a 3rd party site. You can still find links to other sites under the “other free tools” page.

Personally I have found it very useful in my research of web hosting companies. Most obvious use is, for example, for me to check where their servers are located, especially when I was researching Australian web hosting companies. Don’t be deceived by their ABN and .com.au domain name, their servers might be located in Dallas which would be 200+ ms away from Australian east coast.

I also often used lookupCrap.com to check out some of my first-time email correspondents, by greping the IP addresses from the RFC822 headers. Some of them do use Internet services from weird places :)

Most of the time, however, I was just exercising my bit of curiosity. “Where is this site hosted?” I have hacked up a small bookmarklet to assist me looking up the crap.

LookupCrap

If you are an Mozilla/Firefox/Camino user, just drag the above link to your links toolbar. If you are using IE6/IE7, you need to do a right-click on the above link, and then “Add to Favorite”. Haven’t tested on other browsers so YMMV. Now, clicking on that bookmarklet will open up a new window with http://lookupcrap.com/<hostname of current page>. That surely has made by crap-looking up easier.