Creating a website - The Bear and Badger

AJ

Post code lists can be a bitch to maintain, cities would probably be your best bet. So long as there's a distinct separation between locations in each group and you don't need to rely on arbitrary geographical lines of separation you should be fine.

Is there some funding, or established group of volunteers, behind this? It's a fuck load of work otherwise and I'd question the sense in starting it due to the small chance of it becoming anything worthwhile. I am quite negative about these things though.

dynamiteReady

Not sure if there's already something like that out there, but if there's not, you might be on to something Dante...

Diluted Dante

AJ wrote:

Is there some funding, or established group of volunteers, behind this? It's a fuck load of work otherwise and I'd question the sense in starting it due to the small chance of it becoming anything worthwhile. I am quite negative about these things though.

No, just something I've thought about for a while. Watching some CCP Grey and Jay Foreman kicked me to actually do something about it.

dynamiteReady

Probably the nearest thing...

https://www.mysociety.org/wehelpyou/who-is-your-mp

MP's only, but very detailed.

Hodge360

Not sure how your constituencies work over there but I'd probably have a list of them to choose from rather than trying to figure out what one someone belongs to.

AJ

dynamiteReady wrote:

Probably the nearest thing...

https://www.mysociety.org/wehelpyou/who-is-your-mp

MP's only, but very detailed.

Same thing on https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ iirc.

AJ

You might be better off talking to the people running one of the existing things, rather than starting totally from scratch.

dynamiteReady

AJ wrote:

dynamiteReady wrote:

Probably the nearest thing... https://www.mysociety.org/wehelpyou/who-is-your-mp MP's only, but very detailed.

Same thing on https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ iirc.

Yep. Looks like mysociety.org is the parent company.

AJ

Sounds like a conversation with them might be the best place to start then.

b0r1s

So we are now into actual functionality you definitely need a database driven solution. Or plugin a third party solution into yours. Google Maps etc. However you will be hitting costs for the lookups. Basically the more traffic who use your lookups the more it will cost. So ideally you’ll want some revenue income back to offset that.

However a simpler city or town based search can be more easily done with a search algorithm.

For something like this you will definitely need some developer input if you have no coding experience.

AJ

Does it cost to register a charity? They get free Google API access.

Anyway, you wouldn't need an algorithm to look up by town, just an associative list. Hell, you could even put something workable together for that without a developer.

Anyway, there's already people doing related work, if you're serious about the idea, it'd mad to do it in seclusion.

b0r1s

If you are putting in a search (which most people expect) then you would need some form of algorithm to allow for misspelling etc. But a good CMS will have that. Maybe something Lucene based will be a good starting point.

As long as the other people aren’t making money from this then they’d likely share insight. If they are then expect little help unless they are getting something back.

AJ

If you put in a search it'll wasn't something more complex, yeah. I'd probably go more down the autocomplete route myself than a straight up search, though. I was just saying it could be done with nested pages of lists, if Dante just wants to piddle about on his own with this.

I wasn't suggesting asking the others for help, but trying to work with them. Offering them help.

acemuzzy

So I already have some web hosting, but it only lets me do PHP, and I quite fancy some Python shizzle (with full disk access, etc.)

Anyone know a good place to buy that from, that isn't ludicrously expensive, and which also sorts out email hosting for me (where I'd like to move my current address across)?? I guess maybe those are too logically separate things, which don't readily go hand in hand, and I should just do some AWS nonsense for the Python? That has floating IPs though, doesn't it? How do I map my acemuzzy.com domain name into it?

AJ

With a CNAME record, I'd assume.

I've been very happy with Gandi and they do Python hosting, though I've never used it.

acemuzzy

Yes, Gandi do look like the right kind of thing. Thanks!

I guess Amazon would need to own the cname record if they were dynamically changing the IPs. I get confused how DNS routing/recursing work with stuff like that.

dynamiteReady

I'm always bigging up Digital Ocean for cheap clod, but go with whatever works for you price wise. Loads of options these days.

AJ

acemuzzy wrote:

I guess Amazon would need to own the cname record if they were dynamically changing the IPs. I get confused how DNS routing/recursing work with stuff like that.

CNAME records work like a hidden domain redirect; you specify another domain, say muzzy.aws.amazon.com and then when something looks up the record for your domain, it sees the CNAME, looks up the record for the listed domain and uses that. So, Amazon would only need to change the IP on their record and wouldn't need access to your DNS.

acemuzzy

Ah makes sense. Guess I was muddling with ANAME or some other DNS something. Surprisingly rich/complex protocol.

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