So, I was using one of Google’s sign up forms, and I noticed that it gave me a nice tip – The valid zip codes for my state! Along with some sample zip codes for my country (usa). I opened up the firebug console and checked out the ajax call – it was this: https://www.google.com/adsense/addrform/resources?kind=country&code=US

That’s really cool. It returned an XML document with all the state’s valid zipcodes. While it may be unreliable to make this same AJAX call from within your own web application every time, the XML document itself is quite valuable with the zip code validation.

Download that XML document here.

Tinyurl has an API

Wednesday, June 27, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Of course I’d like to do what Twitter does, and generate a Tinyurl in place of a longish URL for each TwitterGram. I had assumed all along that Twitter had a special deal with the TInyurl folks, but apparently not so. They have an open API that is simplicity itself. It’s so simple it’s almost hard to describe. 

Try clicking on this link:  

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://scripting.com/

It returns a Tinyurl. Copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into the address bar of your browser. it should take you to the home page of my weblog. Apparently it works for any URL you give it. And of course you can call it from a script just as easily as you click a link in a browser. Very nice!