Freelancing Gods 2008

A couple of weeks ago I quickly coded a basic webservice – using Merb – for Australian Postcode data. Just got hosting for it sorted out last night, so now I can blog about it.

Postie

The emphasis is on simple – you can search by postcode or suburb, and get the data back either as a HTML page, XML, or JSON. That’s pretty much it. The request urls aren’t complicated, either:

• auspostie.com/Brunswick
• auspostie.com/Brunswick.js
• auspostie.com/Brunswick.xml
• auspostie.com/2782
• auspostie.com/2782.js
• auspostie.com/2782.xml

Suburb requests use partial matching, so you don’t need the full suburb name. If you want the JSON returned with the MIME type of application/json, use the .json extension.

I’ve no plans at this point on using this, but perhaps it’s useful for someone out there – if so, would love to hear about it.