News

"Step one in the enhancement plan was to add a postcode lookup feature that would make it easy for people to submit their full addresses to the mailing list. We could use this information to alert the people in just one road. It would also be useful for weeding out people who'd moved - if we get a second subscriber living at 30 Moon Crescent, it's pretty obvious that the first subscriber has moved out...

...The PostCoder Web browser-to-server (B2S) facility from Allies Computing looked [more] promising. The website advertises a price plan based on the number of people who use the service. This could be quite cheap, considering there are only a couple of thousand households in Priorslee. Allies® gives you a choice of two per-click pricing plans. You can pay either 1p for each address with a minimum charge of £50 (5000 addresses) or 5p an address with a minimum charge of £20 a month (400 addresses). We decided to try the latter plan.

The function is extremely simple to implement. Although there's some complex JavaScript coding going on in the background, you download everything in module form and cut and paste blocks of code into your website. All you have to change is your account ID number. We had the feature up and running in minutes. It didn't look brilliant, but having such a facility on a lowly community website is impressive in itself."

Steve Baxter, Computer Shopper 193 March 2004