Gidday

I've been looking for a rental in Auckland the past couple of weeks and am continuously surprised by the lack of a tool from trademe to show properties on a map (I know which areas/roads I want to live on/near) - saves me clicking through a ton of properties marked Mt Eden that are on the wrong side of Balmoral road (for my personal requirements).

So using the power of the intertubes.. err Yahoo Pipes and the (needing a bit of work) Trademe API, I barfed up something that mostly works.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/davidjroos/trademe_rentals

• To find the District and Suburb codes, search on Trademe.co.nz for properties in that area - the search URL will contain the following: '&135=[DISTRICT]&136=[SUBURB]&'.


• Leave any value empty to return all results for that field.


• You can search multiple suburbs using a comma between codes, eg: '123,456'.


• API limits results to 50.


• Geo positioning data is only as accurate as what Trademe provides per property.

If they do have such a tool, I feel a bit of a fool, but I had (mostly) fun making it anyway.

If anyone can think of a way to parse out the District and Suburb info from here and present it in a nice way, please let me know. All I can think of is doing it manually or with another pipes setup and creating a custom web page front end (pipes doesn't have a way to enable user input from drop down lists).

If you want to modify it, this page is probably going to be helpful.

If anyone from Trademe is reading this, why the hell haven't you implemented this? Give me lots of monies and I'll tell you how . Also, your XML data is perhaps borked, as pipes can't read it (it has no trouble with the JSON fortunately)