Is there an API to get Indian pincodes? - ruby-on-rails

I'm building an application in which I need get pincodes (India) of the users and get the city and the state details. I have not found an effective way to do this other than scrape the internet for pincodes which is quite cumbersome and time consuming.
Is there any API available for this purpose?
P.S. I'm new to stackoverflow.

You can use Indian Pincodes API. I built this for one of our projects. It's simple and you do not need any authentication.
https://www.indianpincodes.co.in/

Related

Keywords Planner in Google Ads API

I am trying to use Keywords Planner programmatically, through its API.I came across Generating Targeting Ideas, which pretty much summarizes the use. When I visit Get Started, it states
Try the new Google Ads API—which has the latest Google Ads features. The AdWords API is in maintenance mode and not being actively developed.
I visit Google Ads API, where I cannot find anything related to the Keyword Planner.
Has someone any idea if the planner is available through the new API, or do I have to use the old one?
Thanks,
Alexios
I'm currently working on converting an old Adwords cron job to the new Ads API. While I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, the old TargetingIdeaService has been replaced with a new KeywordPlanIdeaService (see https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/migration/services).
You can find examples for KeywordPlanIdeaService here:
https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/samples/generate-keyword-ideas
Pay careful attention to how the code formats each selector field and using a helper class to format language and geotargeting codes. It's not the most intuitive way of passing paramters.

What is a good strategy for staying up-to-date with external API's?

My project is reliant on several API's, like Twitter and Youtube for example. Recently, Youtube deprecated their old API, and it caused issues with my team's iPad app.
We could have stayed ahead of the change if we were paying attention to Youtube's announcements of the upcoming deprecation. But alas, we were not and the idea of staying up to date with all of our dependencies manually(browsing the web) seems exhausting and inefficient.
I have found the following tool to help notify when changes occur with external library dependencies, https://libraries.io. However, this does not help with API dependencies.
Besides checking the API source webpages every so often, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how to stay notified and up-to-date with news regarding updates to a specified list of external API's?
After some time looking at different options, I have found a solution that is not perfect, but seems to work best at fitting this need.
Solution Description
This solution uses a combination of Twitter, Google Scripts, and website blogtrottr.com. I am creating a twitter list of reliable dev handles that often post updates on new API. For example I made a list that contained #twitterapi and #YouTubeDev. Used Google Scripts to create an online feed out of the twitter list. Then used blogtrottr to email me every time that feed gets a new posting.
Steps to Implement
Create a twitter list of reliable handles that often post about updates to their API
Create an RSS Feed from that Twitter list. The details for how to do this can be found here.
Plug that url that you get from Google Script into blogtrotter.
I did find some other ways to do this, but so far this is the only solution that was 100% free!

Display content based on location

How do I go about displaying content based on a users location ? For ex. If somebody accesses the site from the New York , I would like to display New York Hotels . However if somebody accesses the site from Chicago , I would like to display Chicago hotels.
You're looking for a Geoloction database which would give you access to the typical IP ranges for the countries/cities you need to flag.
This is not absolute or completely trustworthy information though. Country level geo-location is mostly effective but anything like city/state/zip code level information should be treated with great caution.
I've worked with major multinational media providers using expensive paid services and discovered that the information in these databases is a very long way from correct and that users individual circumstances often prevent geo-location from being effective.
e.g. Virgin and East Coast trains in the UK use T-Mobile Germany as their onboard internet provider so you appear to be in Germany to many sites and payment processors.
There are quite a few free geolocation databases, MaxMind springs to mind (though this is not a recommendation of their service).
You can find some thoughts on implementing geo-location here
You need some database/api with information about hotells in different locations, then you need to now where the visitor is.
You can use something like Travel/Hotel API's? to find hotells.
And for finding the location of your visitor you can use something like http://www.hostip.info/use.html
or you can use HTML5 geolocation api example http://html5demos.com/geo . The bad thing with the html5 geo api is that the user need to accept before you get their location.
Remember that there is no guaranty that the location is correct...
This is the exact reason I created wpgeocode. WPGeocode is a free plugin for wordpress that enables publishers to customize content based on reader location. Check out the plugin at the support site at http://www.wpgeocode.com
The plugin enables shortcodes that can be placed in your posts or pages. There are many conditional shortcodes such as [wpgc_is_country_code country_code="US"] for this exact purpose. Simple open the shortcode, specify the target country_code and provide the content to be displayed if the reader is visiting from that specific country.
Visit http://www.wpgeocode.com/shortcodes for a complete listing - here are a few:
[wpgc_is_city_and_state city=”Yardley” state_code=”PA”]
[wpgc_is_ip” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx”]
[wpgc_is_ips” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx,aa.bb.cc.dd”]
[wpgc_is_not_ip” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx”]
[wpgc_is_not_ips” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx,aa.bb.cc.dd”]
[wpgc_is_city” city=””]
[wpgc_is_cities” cities=”city one,city two,city three”]
[wpgc_is_not_city” city=””]
[wpgc_is_not_cities” cities=”city
one,city two,city three”]
[wpgc_is_nearby”] – Uses the value you
specify in the Nearby Range setting from the administrative panel
[wpgc_is_not_nearby”]
[wpgc_is_within” miles=”10″]
[wpgc_is_within
kilometers=”12″]
[wpgc_is_country_name” country_name=””]
[wpgc_is_country_names” country_name=”United States,Egypt,Albania”]
[wpgc_is_country_code” country_code=””]
[wpgc_is_country_codes”
country_codes=”US,GB,AZ”]
[wpgc_is_state_code” state_code=””]
[wpgc_is_state_codes” state_codes=”PA,NJ,TX”]
[wpgc_is_not_country_name” country_name=””]
[wpgc_is_not_country_names” country_names=”United
States,Egypt,Albania”]
[wpgc_is_not_country_code” country_code=””]
[wpgc_is_not_country_codes” country_codes=”US,GB,AZ”]
[wpgc_is_not_state_code” state_code=””]
[wpgc_is_not_state_codes”
state_codes=”PA,NJ,TX”]
dotCMS offers the ability to geolocate content OTB (disclaimer, I work for them). You can see a demonstration that displays news content based on the user's location onthe demo site:
It is pretty easy to setup and use. Any type of content can be geolocated and the content can be accessed through the RESTful API. Under the covers, the Geolocation queries are handled natively via Elasticsearch.
Example:
http://demo.dotcms.com/demos/content-geolocation
Docs:
http://dotcms.com/docs/latest/es-geolocation-queries

Determining language of twitter posts

What is the best way to determine the language of twitter posts.
There is the language parameter that comes with the streaming API but it doesn't really seem to be very accurate. Even many Japanese posts are labelled as English.
What have others done to sort out the langauges?
I've had very good results with this PHP package:
http://pear.php.net/package/Text_LanguageDetect/
It is fast and open source. We use it to select English only posts for a site we run at http://2012twit.com.
google have language detection within their Translate API if using evil external services is a go-er?
http://code.google.com/apis/language/translate/v1/reference.html#detectResult

what POIs (Point of Interests) DB can I use for a commercial app

I need a POI database for a startup project I am working on - it will be a free basic version and a premium paid for version in the sense that user will pay a monthly subscription.
I would like to use foursquare type checkin to places and plancast type functionality to search for places (one-line search). Ie I need to:
perform a search for POIs around a location
associate users to that POI, with a time stamp
allow users to add own POIs
provide free-text search for POIs (a la google one-line search)
Google API allows great search, but I understand there are limits in number of requests that can be done? This would prevent scaling, and may result in application breaking when too many users. Also what does google T&C say about using this in a paid for service?
Openstreetmap I understand does not have these contstraints, but do they also provide a good one-line search type API? Or how could I solve this?
have a look at http://eventful.com/ or http://qype.com - they both have APIs you can call to get find out whats happening near you. You can convert these events into POIs in your application. The APIs are free to use (your app just need to credit Eventful or Qype).
Take a look at the API at http://compass.webservius.com - may not have everything you need, but has very rich data on 16+ million business locations in the USA.

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