Show HN: ZipLocate, a free API for zip code geolocation | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ZipLocate, a free API for zip code geolocation

ziplocate.us

140 pointsnathancahill55 comments

This reminded me of a little suggestion by Bret Victor (http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#reducing_interaction).

Imagine honing in on familiar areas simply by typing the first few digits of a zip code—type “9” to immediately zoom into the US west coast, followed by “4” to zoom into the SF bay area and then “5” for the east bay. Because of the immediate feedback, the user can stop typing when she gets close enough, and use relative navigation from there.

I coded up an example a little while ago (http://andrewcou.ch/zip-to-it/).

Are you keeping stats on your request? I'm curious how high 90210 stands out.

That's a great idea. (Un)fortunately it's all client-side.

Guessing you could probably put everything into a redis instance and just hincrby/incr for either the individual queries ie "902", "9021", "90210."

Not sure what would be more performant, REST or a websocket. Not doing anything would be the fastest, though!

http://redis.io/commands/HINCRBY

A Google Analytics tracking of the events would be just fine for this goal.

Oh, great idea! I've never dived (dove??) into event tracking. Is something like this what I want?

    ga('send', 'event', 'input', 'search', 'zip', zipCode);

That will do the trick!

This is really cool, but ultimately not that practical because it doesn't display the zipcode boundaries.

If it were integrated with zipcode boundary information as this [ http://www.usnaviguide.com/zip.htm ] site does with google maps, it would be pretty awesome.

Interesting idea. I didn't really try too hard making it a complete product, since I was only interested in proving the navigation concept that Bret Victor had described. But that's a good idea, and if you're interested feel free to fork it and add that capability!

I think this zooms in too far on the last level. Very nice, though!

I had the same concern when I built it, but the data source I was using only provides centroid information, not boundaries. I thought for a while trying to come up with a solution and ended up ignoring it, since I was mainly interested in a proof of concept. If you'd like to fork it and improve you're more than welcome to!

Another example of the same zip code interaction idea, with some pretty UI: http://benfry.com/zipdecode/

You should probably mention the caveats when using ZCTA's to get a list of zips... Namely that they don't include all zip codes, don't get updated as quickly, and may not actually represent the same thing as a zip code:

http://catalog.data.gov/dataset/tiger-line-shapefile-2013-20...

Yes, you're right. Added to the page.

This is a pretty small and mostly importantly, relatively static database. Why not cache it locally rather than access as a web service.

That being said, zip+4 is a bigger DB. Although, I have heard those last four digits are meaningless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newman_%28Seinfeld%29

Do you have any plans to do the other way around? That's important for converting the browser's geolocation data into something usable.

Ah, but then the data wouldn't fit into 1.6MB!

That is to say, going the other way is a bit more computationally intensive.

We have a free API that includes IP to approximate area code, but not zip code, if that's of use to you.

https://www.dailycred.com/api/info.json

A few of our clients needed this, so we just made it open to everyone.

It's based on GeoIP and ua-parser.

http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/

https://github.com/tobie/ua-parser

Check http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/developerdocs#coordinates2... and http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/developerdocs#coordinates2... You can use these APIs locally via vagrant or launch a amazon AMI http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/developerdocs#setup

you may enjoy: http://geocoder.opencagedata.com

we aggregate OSM, Datascience tool kit, geonames, and more. All feedback welcome

Interestingly enough zip codes don't cover the entire US. Not even the entire continental US. Lat/Long 40, -110 (in NE Utah) is a good test case to make sure your code handles that circumstance.

Does what it says. Simple, free, & open source. What could be better?

This might sound silly but you should actually have a "plus" plan or something that you charge for - free services have a problem of suddenly disappearing without any notice. Paid customers ensure that service will be available in the future too.

The code is on github so you can host it on your own server fairly easily.

The website says that it's very lightweight (everything stored in memory) and currently running on a low cost server.

Download a copy now and save it just in case, if your business really depends on it then it would be better to host yourself anyways.

How about sharing an itunes wish list or suggesting beer you like or something that people who appreciate the service can thank you with?

Or a donate/flattr button.

Fair enough, added.

Very nice. Small enough that I can read and understand every line of code, and it still does something useful.

One thing I don't get, is why you're not using the zip code as the primary key (or have any other sort of index on it). The id isn't even used as far as I can tell. Is it just blazingly fast enough as it is?

Personally, I always use either an auto-incremented ID or a GUID. I don't like using a real value of the object as a key. Generally, I think it's good practice, but you're right... I'd index off of that.

The database is mostly an abstraction layer for other people to get up and running with the API. On ZipLocate.us everything is cached in memory using Varnish, so API calls never even hit the database. When data is updated, updated zip codes are just refreshed in the cache.

Like disdev, I always use an auto-incrementing id, but you're right that the index should be on the zip code instead of the id.

Thanks nathancahill!

Here's a 44 line node script to exercise it with:

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johnnylambada/commandline-...

$ chmod a+x ziplocate

$ ./ziplocate ll -z 90210

latitude : 34.0908301410233

longitude: -118.409045888318

Ziptastic is another option that seems to work well. http://getziptastic.com also plays nice with javascript and has a ruby gem.

Ziptastic is awesome. Part of the inspiration to build ZipLocate.

Nice and free. Thanks a lot. Will suggest you to add Gittip. Might help you in releasing some more similar projects for free.

Thanks, added.

This made me remember a cool analogous project

http://api.zippopotam.us/

Why not use Geonames: http://www.geonames.org/ ?

You can also download all the zip-codes for many countries from them: http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/

really nice thanks! i made a small php class to get work done. https://github.com/ins0/php-simple-ziplocate

Anything similar to this available for Canada?

Is there something similar for UK postcodes?

Unfortunately, while the data definitely exists (and UK postal codes are much smaller), it's copyrighted by the Royal Mail.

Host it in the US, there is no database copyright in the US.

Actually, zip codes are proprietary business information of the USPS. Which is why ZipLocate uses ZCTA codes (similar, but based on data collected from censuses).

CodePoint Open has been freely available for a number of years. It doesn't include delivery endpoints but for geolocating English, Scottish and Welsh (but, alas, not Northern Irish) postcodes it's fine.

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/prod...

Unfortunately we lost the postcode database as a public asset in 2013 when the UK government sold off Royal Mail[0], despite the database being compiled at huge cost to the tax payer.

This is a real shame as people had to campaign for years before the data was made freely available to begin with.[1]

Hopefully though, as long as the government still holds a large stake, we'll at least have Code Point. The Royal Mail also offer some developer options[2]

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26605375

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/22/free-our-d...

[2] http://www.poweredbypaf.com/developer/

http://www.uk-postcodes.com/

http://mapit.mysociety.org/

I made up this demo:

http://whatpostcodeamiin.com

which uses browser location finding to tell you what postcode you are in (more or less). If you'd be interested, I have a beta API which will return full postcode info based on latitude/longitude; it's kind of beta, but I'd be happy to provide access if you need it.

Looks nice, kudos for offering it for free - 5$/month is still not nothing. It would be grand if you included "US" somewhere besides the domain, because the service geolocates US zipcodes, not international zip codes.

ZIP codes are the name for US-specific postal codes. International postal codes are not zip codes.

Very often ZIP code is used as alias for postal code even in international context. I see "zip code" more often than "postal code" on international address forms.

Can you show me an example of an address form for non-US-based organization that exclusively uses the term "zip code"?

I'm not saying they don't exist, but I'm not sure I've ever seen one.

The US-based organizations using the term "zip code" for non-US addresses are doing so either out of ignorance or expediency, since fitting "zip/postal code" into a space is sometimes not possible.

I've seen it quite a bit in especially older e-commerce software, presumably developed for US use, then "internationalized" as a bit of an afterthought. I also think that many non-native-english-speakers assume zip code is the appropriate translation of postal code since it features rather prominently in (exported) US pop culture.

That doesn't make it correct, and I don't believe that some peoples unequivocally wrong usage of a term should oblige other people to qualify their correct and unambiguous usage of it.

As a customer in Germany, I find them on almost every international order form.

As a recent example, see KanbanFlow for example https://sites.fastspring.com/kanbanflow/order/customer

The "Zip code" input field is simply hard coded for every country.

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