Sunday, March 13, 2005

Web Page Plus: UK Postcodes

A couple of days ago, I blogged about a postcode <link />, implicitly hinting that it might lead to some interesting Web Page Plus functionality through bookmarklets and Firefox extensions...

To move this on a bit, it seems sensible to provide a bookmarklet generator to support the easy creation of links into an arbitrary postcode service... And when I get a chance, that's exactly what I'll do...

Of course, if pages don't include something like <link rel="postcode" type="text/html" title="mk7 6AA" /> the bookmarklets won't be of much use, at least until I work out how to build a Firefox Extension that will let me use reg-exp identified postcodes in an arbitrary page (I know, I know, the ethics of rewriting other people's pages in your browser may or may not be a good thing... see The Google Autolink Debate for a recap).

Anyway, to be going on with, there are a couple more demo bookmarklets... Last time, I demonstrated the postcode <link /> with this
UK Postcode Map Bookmarklet. It's easy enough to tweak this code to access other services by changing a single argument, so here are a few derived bookmarklets...

- UK UpMyStreet Bookmarklet

- UK Postcode to Grid Co-ordinates Bookmarklet

If you customise your bookmarklet with a 'home' variable setting, then it's straightforward to bookmarklet "arity 2" postcode related webpages... You can imagine using this to bookmarklet a route finding service between your home, say, and a postcode <link />ed page, such as these two:

- Michelin Routefinder Bookmarklet

- Green Flag Routefinder Bookmarklet

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