One thing that always strikes me at hackdays is how much more productive they are if there are already APIs available. It’s totally blindingly obvious. The less time you have to spend scraping, parsing, cleaning, finding out where the layout of what you’re scraping breaks etc, the better. That gives you more time to actually make things that’ll make a difference.

As I mentioned yesterday, there’s an interesting and important Rewired State day about digital inclusion happening in a couple of weeks time at Google HQ. Obviously my mind started to whir a bit as to what could be made. UK Online will be providing their online center data for people to make things from, but I thought I’d help to get myself and other people a headstart by firing up YQL/AppEngine and making a little API onto their location finder feature on their website. 

The code is on GitHub now, please fork it, ammend it, don’t poke at it/me too hard with a critical eye, it’s only an hour of very rough work but it does the job. One thing I may add to it is a querystring parameter to split the address up into fields (mainly to reduce the need to parse the return for a postcode). 

It’s quite simple, you just do a GET like this and out pops some JSON. 

http://ukonline-fakeapi.appspot.com/?postcode=ec1a4dd

You can provide a callback parameter too if you like to get JSONP. 

Happy playing and hopefully see some of you on August 7th for a day of fun. Sign up here.