Month: August 2009

Free UK Postcode Geocoding

Flipflops 1 Comment

I’ve just come across and started using a brilliant new free UK postcode lookup (so far it has provided me with the Latitude & Longitude of every postcode I’ve thrown at it), it’s fast, free and easy to use and can return the Latitude & Longitude as either CSV or JSON – whatever takes your fancy. Perhaps best of all, all it requires is the postcode, not other parts of the address like a property name or number.

http://www.ernestmarples.com (apparently Ernest Marples was the Postmaster general who introduced the postcode to the UK)

A quick vaguely Cakey post

Flipflops

Not a real post this really, more of a snippet, but something of interest. I just switched on view cacheing for my UK Business Directory (a personal project of mine) and by my rough and ready benchmarking with firebug the load times increased by 75%. The site is hosted on Dreamhost which whilst great value for money and very featureful isn’t always the fastest of hosts, so it has made a real difference.

I’ve also just added fulltext search to the site – its slightly unusual in that it searches two tables at either end of a HABTM relationship, when I get the time I’m planning to write a quick post about setting that up with CakePHP.