new web portal, some interesting implementation details

I thought about writing a free community web portal (OurEvents.us) just for my own community but decided to scale it up to support the U.S. The most interesting technical problem was getting free ZIP code data from the US government, and writing a little code for approximating the distances between different zip codes - I needed this because I wanted people to be able to enter their own zip code and search for all events within a specified distance. This simple web portal took me two evenings to write so I am hopeful that it catches on in my own community. It would be very cool if a few other communities also started using it also. It is currently on a very low cost VPS server and should scale fairly well for use by several hundred communities; more than that and I will move it to a non VPS server.

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