Although to most people, Montlake SortIPs might seem the least useful of the USELESS applications so far posted on this web site, but over the years, this application (or a version thereof) has been by far the more often used. This is because I have regularly engaged in "web traffic analysis."

If you're in the web site business, you know the importance of logs in determining the usage patterns and practices for your site. The web server tracks every access of its published sites, and writes such detail as when the web resource was accessed and by whom. Of course, it cannot know who 'whom' is, but it knows whom's client IP address. Sometimes, a client IP absolutely identifies a user, but most of the time it simply identifies a group to which the user belongs. These groups can be identified to an interesting and useful degree. With a reasonable degree of certainty, you can identify the country of origin, as well as the ISP providing Internet services to the user.

World IP addresses are allocated in blocks. The boundaries of these blocks are published publicly. Therefore, with some effort you can determine where the user is when he is accessing your site. You might take a day's log, extract the IP addresses, and then analyze to determine that information. The first step in such an analysis is to aid block determination by sorting your IPs. After that, you can easily transfer block information to your collection of IPs, and gain significant knowledge of your user base.

Montlake SortIPs lets you either paste in a Clipboard full of IP addresses, or let's you read in a file containing IPs. In either case, the result is a sorted list ready for analysis.