Seeking a "Find My Nearest" bolt-on feature.

[BadChough]

I am planning a website that will require a "Find My Nearest" feature in which the Postcodes of various businesses are compared to the customer's Postcode, and the nearest 3 or 4 Businesses are displayed (I'm UK based). I have come across what sounds like just the right sort of bolt-on thing at

http://www.postcode.org.uk

but it costs £400, and that's a recurring annual expense.
Can anyone recommend a cheaper, or free, alternative?
I have some small familiarity with PHP/MYSQL.
Thanks.

 

[audiopro]

How are you getting the buisiness information into your database? Rather than postcode, you could use OS grid references for your distance calculation. There are lists available with the grid reference already in.

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[Mike Lewis]

BadChough,

If you use postcodes, you're going to be stuck with the cost. There are several packages available that will convert postcodes to grid references, from which you can then calculate straight-line distances, but they all require the Postal Address File (PAF), for with the Post Office charges a hefty licence fee.

So, unless you find a way of capturing grid references other than through postcodes, you'll have to get your chequebook out.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro tips, advice, training, consultancy
Custom software for your business

 

[audiopro]

It would also depend on how accurate your distances need to be. I have never seen any need for figures such as 1.23km when 1.5 km is accurate enough. How big is the geographical area you wish to cover? If it is only small, getting the grid references manually, of all the towns and villages in the area would be a straight forward job.

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[BadChough]

I hope the site will cover at least England, so manually calculating grid refs is too much of a chore.
I've now found

http://www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk

which seems to offer a cheaper option .....
One way or the other it looks as if I'll will have to cough-up!
Thanks for the help.

 

[ChrisHunt]

You could explore using the Google Maps geocoding service to convert addresses into lat/longs. It's free, but if you give it just a postcode, it's been nobbled: type in, say, "AB7 2GR" and it will pinpoint the middle of AB7. Still, that may be close enough for your purposes.

If you think it's daft that we should pay for postcodes that we've already paid to set up, you should take a look at

http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[Mike Lewis]

Chris,

The article you mentioned raises some good points. I believe that in the US, data collected by federally-funded authorities is automatically available without copyright or royalty fees (not sure about that; someone correct me if I'm wrong).

On the other hand, maybe it's better to have access to the highest-quality data on a paid-for basis, rather than having free data of lower quality. I'm thinking particularly of OS maps. I hate it that anyone wanting to reproduce a map here has to pay a fee to the OS, but I'd hate it much more of our maps were reduced the quality of the American equivalent.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro tips, advice, training, consultancy
Custom software for your business