Hello to all members ,

 

Hope 2015 have started in the best of way for all of ya .

Im SJ from england i have a Computer repair and services shop and trying to learn more about designing as im ok with photoshop an all but not really good with wed developing languages .

 

Im trying to build a website the searches for areas and postcodes and let ppl write comments about them , is it possible and where should i start .

 

 

Thanks alot for looking

and hope that everybody has a great 2015 .

Regrads

SJ

Could you expand on the functionality of your idea? I don't get why people would want to post comments about a postcode, I'm sure there must be more to this?

Thx for answering mate , its about people wanting to know who they might know living in the area , so they put a postcode and search for it .

Welcome to the forums

That's sort of like a Yellow pages. I'm not an expert on back-end things but that kind of functionality would be a massive undertaking. You're probably talking in the 10's of thousands if you were to hire a developer to build such a system for example. Perhaps some API that already exists though that allows you to pull down this data, but it's highly likely that they will charge you for this. As for allowing people to post to it, I think that's where the 10+ grand would come in as it would have to then be a custom system that you control.

 

It is certainly not something that somebody new to coding should try and undertake.

Edited January 7, 201511 yr by rbrtsmith

Welcome matey.

 

That's a big asking right there, postcode lookups are massive but that said it's not something I'm unfamiliar with as i've built a big geo system for locating before although it was based on place names and part post codes (SM1) rather than full post codes (SM1 3RH). What you will need;

 

SQL - you'll need database, the important thing to look into here is geo storage. SQL has spatial references to read up on. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/gis-wkt-functions.html

PHP - connections and queries, security etc.

Caching - You need to look up ways to cache data to save the server undue stress. On my project it runs a cron overnight to prepare arrays to be used for results but there are other ways. Also think in advance about radius from the start point, showing all posts nationally could be an issue

Base Data - You'll need to work out how you are essentially going to collate and store the postcodes. There are many services for this, e.g. postcoder.com all of which use the paf dataset mixed with a few custom bits. If using a service like this you'll need to 'store' the reply data else it'll get super expensive quickly. This could then be changed to search your data first for a postcode and if you don't have it then search it and store the result for next time. Bewarned though, the paf database is not small so performance / data splitting might be required.

 

Or simply find a solid api you don't mind paying for. I mean Google lets you look up X amount of geo queries per day before you start paying, this could work depending on user demand.

 

Hope this helps.

Thx for answering mate , its about people wanting to know who they might know living in the area , so they put a postcode and search for it .

 

There are a number of ways to do something like that, but your best bet would be to use existing data, rather than creating a database of your own. If a user is searching for friends within a location, I'd say the Facebook Graph API would be a good option. All that would be required is to login with your FB account and authenticate.

 

The FB Graph location will output the users location as specified by them, so the results may not always be accurate. You will need to do several checks to make sure the data querying the API is as clean as possible, and remove anything that could cause issues (for example, locations with or without capital letters, spelling errors, ect).

 

In terms of a postcode lookup, there are several services out there that do this. You would need to loop through your list of friends countries, and check to see if they match your postcode (http://postcodes.io/docs). One approach could be:

 

User logs in and authenticates - application temporarily stores FB friends locations - user searches postcode - postcode 'country' is returned from the postcode API and checked against the list of your friends for matches.

 

Something along those lines. It's a very tall order if you can't write code though.

 

You will need to do several checks to make sure the data querying the API is as clean as possible, and remove anything that could cause issues (for example, locations with or without capital letters, spelling errors, ect).

 

This is paramount. The headaches I had with the geo system before was differences between data sources and user input. For example Channel Islands and Channel Isl ... both can be returned from different sources but they don't match. The other thing to watch for is out of date data; Middlesex technically doesn't exist as a county, it only exists like this for ceremonial purposes but most people enter and address with Middlesex when it should be Greater London.

 

Edit: forgot to say also note that Ireland does not have traditional postcodes, only Northern Ireland.

Edited January 7, 201511 yr by BrowserBugs

 

This is paramount. The headaches I had with the geo system before was differences between data sources and user input. For example Channel Islands and Channel Isl ... both can be returned from different sources but they don't match. The other thing to watch for is out of date data; Middlesex technically doesn't exist as a county, it only exists like this for ceremonial purposes but most people enter and address with Middlesex when it should be Greater London.

 

Edit: forgot to say also note that Ireland does not have traditional postcodes, only Northern Ireland.

 

Yup, Channel Islands is an awful one for it. Some use CI, others C.I, some write the full name. It's a nightmare.

 

I'm really surprised FB doesn't have a database of this, so that places are consistent. There are loads of the same user locations, but with slight variations. Surely it would make any location based search / advertising much worse?!

WOW !!!!

First of all thanks alot

rbrtsmith BrowserBugs and Jack for your replies , i really didnt think that it was a huge task as it sounded much easier in my head it always does i guess , but you guys gave me a place to start from which is a great deal for me , i ll let you know if ive made any progress in the future ,

 

 

 

and thanks to

dedideals

for welcoming me

You're welcome. If you need guidance on where to begin, we have a fair few topics on learning to code already, available from all good search bars. Alternatively, you can start another thread if the topic doesn't quite match what you're looking for.

Welcome to WDF!

 

Have you looked into memcache or redis?

 

Not yet, will take a look.