Blog

As Nick hinted at in his previous post, all the source code that runs this site is available at our public subversion repository. We think this is important, not only because we're generally open source friendly people, but because for all the will in the world, we don't really have time to devote as much as we'd like to the project (we all have full-time jobs, and other projects too).

Being custodians of public data seems like a large responsibility, though, so we feel bad about neglecting things. So how can you help?

Well, you can probably guess. If you're a coder (Perl and Python currently) and have ideas for some of the many ways npemap site (and maybe the as-yet-unstarted central freepostcodes.org.uk site) can be improved, head over to our dev site and issue tracker, start thinking about what you could do and get coding! We know that things are a little rough round the edges, but we'll try our hardest to support people developing things, so if you can't get a development environment up and running, or you would like commit access, or you would like us to push out some changes to the site, just ask us. We have a mailing list to chat on, and are always available at webmaster@npemap.org.uk.

Since the beginning of the site, we have included data from Free The Postcode, which is another site dedicated to producing public domain postcode data. These entries show up on our maps with a purple marker (our data has a green marker).

From this week, we're pleased to announce we're including data from a second public domain, collaborative postcode project. This one is the Locating Postboxes project, run by Matthew Somerville. Some of the postboxes they locate have known postcodes, and this data is shown on our site with pink markers.

As with Free The Postcode, this data is imported into our site nightly. Our importer scripts are also open source, and available from here, which people are always welcome to use and improve

By popular request, we're now providing an RSS feed of recent postcode submissions, at http://www.npemap.org.uk/allpostcodes.rss.

This feed is similar to the one provided by Free The Postcode, and is a geo-referenced (geoRSS) feed of the 100 most recently submitted postcodes.

We hope this'll prove useful for those of you who want to update their NPEMap data on the fly, and for other uses we've yet to think of. Please do get in touch if there are other useful formats you'd like to get our data in, if the downloads and rss feed don't fit your needs, and we'll see what we can do.

We're still chugging along, although we haven't had much time to devote to the project recently. We reached the 30,000 mark a few weeks ago, which shows that interest in the project is being maintained (along with our recent mention in the Reg Developer).

We've recently set up a mailing list and corresponding forum (both feed data both ways between each other so you can choose your preferred interface) for general discussion about the project, and to try and get to know some of our contributors/users. Hope to see you there!

It has been a little while since our last update, but we once again have new maps for the site.

This time, it's coverage of the Channel Islands. After much searching, we have managed to track down some 1930s maps of both Jersey and Guernsey, which are now scanned and online.

So, if you know of any postcodes for either Jersey or Guernsey, now's the time to add them in!

Thanks to hard work by Mike Calder and Andrew Rowbottom, we have now completed our mapping coverage of Scotland. You can see the full coverage best on our large map overview page.

We still need quite a few Scottish postcodes though, so now's the perfect time to enter the postcodes of places you know in Scotland!

We've added a new feature to the site, which allows you to enter your search term as part of the URL, and have that search automatically executed for you. So, if you wanted to link to our maps for a variety of different places, you can now do so with a predictable URL.

To use this, the base URL is http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/? . Then, put your search term after the ?, such as:

• http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/?Oxford
• http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/?IV4 7EP
• http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/?NT453622
• http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/?55.8592, -4.2567

As you can see, it's now possible to search by postcode, 6 figure grid reference, latitude and longitude, and place name (thanks to Geonames).

Unfortunately the hard drive hosting parts of our site filled up just before 7 this morning, so the database and tiles were both unavailable for about an hour. I apologise for any inconvenience that may have been caused, but our hosting is kindly donated by urchin.earth.li, and has been fast and reliable up until now.

As you might be able to see from the front page, we now have even more maps of Scotland, all the way up the East coast from England to Kirkcaldy, and then a lot of the mountains and islands further North and in the west.

People in Northern Ireland might have to wait even longer. We have not had any offers of maps that we can use for that region. If you do have any 1 inch to the mile maps that are out of copyright then we are interested in hearing from you.

We currently have postcodes for 80% of the postcode prefixes (eg the OX12 part of OX12 5AB) in the UK. We think this is pretty much all the prefixes we can currently get, with the remaining 20% being in Northern Ireland, and the parts of Scotland for which we lack maps.

With that in mind, we've started tracking another measure of our progress. This time, it's the number of postcode sectors we have. (A postcode sector is the prefix & the next digit, eg 'OX12 5').

Currently, our sector coverage is 55%. There's no reason why it shouldn't be almost as high as our prefix figure, so that leaves quite a few more sectors for which we have maps, but no postcodes.

So, that's our next target - get the sector coverage up to the same level as our prefix coverage. Now's the perfect time to start entering postcodes for that little bit further away than you have been already!

A few weeks ago, the Guardian named us as one of the new 100 most useful sites, which was very nice of them. It has given us quite a lot of new postcodes, and offers of a few more missing maps.

Speaking of new maps, we've added a few more places recently. These include The Isle of Man, The Island of Arran, Lanark, Dundee and St Andrews and Aberdeen.

You can see exactly where we have coverage on our all maps overview page. It's worth checking from time to time, as we add new maps more frequently than we post news updates.