So I have a club membership list of 285 members, and part of the data is suburb and postcode. We need volunteers for an event in 3 weeks time, and I want to be able to ring a few people close to the event, but there's no point me ringing people on the other side of the city.

Would anyone here, by chance, know of any or have developed anything to calculate distances between postcodes based on any lists (eg, from AusPost) in bulk? This would make my task easier.

Thanks,
Tim

I have all the data required to do this but can't share it out (work reasons) and it's also pretty complex doing spatial calculations. If you want to know the suburbs that are within X kilometers of another suburb than I can do that and post it back here.

Can you post the bulk list from auspost?

last edited by Alt_F4 at 11:06:10 17/Sep/09

I manage 350 peeps at times (soccer club) and I just use Data -> Filter and then hide all but the postcode where the event is. Start with that list. Can't get enough people, expand to next suburbs postcode.

I made a PHP thing to do something like this, it used Google (?GeoIP ? can't remember) to geocode the address to a lat/lon and then used some trigonometry to do a radius proximity search for lat/lon coordinates in a database within a range. The idea was you type in your address and it shows you a gmap of you at the centre, and it automatically zooms to a level that shows 10 closest businesses selling the product. Find a salon post code search.


Here's the sort of query you'd be looking at for radius proximity that takes the roundness of the earth into account:

$query = "
SELECT l.eid, l.latitude, l.longitude, SQRT( POW( 69.1 * ( l.latitude - ".$latlon['lat']."
) , 2 ) + POW( 69.1 * ( ".$latlon['lon']." - l.longitude ) * COS( l.latitude /
57.3 ) , 2 ) ) AS distance FROM {location} l
AND l.latitude IS NOT NULL AND l.longitude IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY distance ASC
";

last edited by thermite at 11:17:55 17/Sep/09

therm, that's a really nice bit of work there.

Looks like he's randomly mashed the keyboard.

I had a better one to show - but since I don't maintain these anymore they've f***ed the other one up somehow and it always goes to europe.