We are currently experimenting with a couple of different types of old Scottish maps, with varying levels of sucess.

The easiest maps to work with are the 7^th edition maps, which were created using the National Grid. These can be tiled up, and then used on the site in just the same way as the existing New Popular Edition maps of England and Wales. There are only two snags: Not all of the Scottish 7^th edition maps are out of copyright, and we don't have all of the ones that are. If anyone does have any of them, we'd love to hear from them.

Next up, we have the updated Popular Edition maps from the 1940s, which had the National Grid printed over them. These were produced both for the War Office, and for general sale to the public (though we don't think very large numbers of them were). As these maps weren't originally produced with the National Grid, when added it's not completely straight. This means it's more work to tile them, but not impossible.

We have done a trial run with an updated Popular Edition map, and the result (covering Inverness) can be seen here. We are currently getting several of these maps scanned in, so we hope to be able to show maps for some of Scotland in the next few weeks. We don't have these maps for all of Scotland though, so again we'd love to hear from anyone who does.

Finally, a very kind person has offered us all of the Popular Edition maps (from the 1920s) for Scotland, just as soon as he's had them scanned in. Unfortunately, the Popular Edition wasn't produced against the National Grid, so the process of converting the scans into suitable tiles looks like being quite a complex one. So, it may be some time until we can put these maps online.

On a related note, we're still very keen to hear from anyone who has out of copyright 1 inch to the mile maps of Northern Ireland. Do please get in touch if you have some.

Sorry for that lack of updates here. We do have jobs and lives outside this site I'm afraid.

Last time we thought we were doing well at just over 1000 postcodes. Now we have 10000!

This is thanks to publicity from The Guardian and BoingBoing among others.

Progress towards collecting a complete set of outward parts is very good. 77% is actually most of the postcodes in England and Wales. It turns out that the list that we generated the list of missing postcodes from was not very accurate — we are probably very nearly there.

I guess our next goal will be the complete set of outward and the number from the inward part, which we seem to be nearly half way towards. This will allow us to achieve accuracy across the whole country of a mile or so for pinpointing any location.

Thank you to everyone that has helped create our data, and do email us if you are using our data so we can share your story on the website (though no guarantees).

Coming soon: An API that allows you to query the location of a postcode using our database.

Latest news on Scotland and Northern Ireland: We have some maps but nothing scanned. The Popular Edition maps are going to be hard to orthorectify as they don't have any national grid lines on them. The War office editions have the gridlines over-printed, but not parallel with the edges of the maps, and the 7th edition maps are not going out of copyright for another 3-5 years. We still have no maps of Northern Ireland apart from our really low-res ones.

We're progressing very well. This was going to be a post yesterday morning for us passing 1000 postcodes. By the end of the working day we had passed the number that FreeThePostcode have collected so far. Now we have over 1600. This is an amazing respose.

You can now see the progress on the front page, where we list some numbers: the number of postcodes collected from this site, the number of unique outward parts (the first half of he postcode) entered on this site, and the percentage of all of the GB outward parts that have been located between us and FreeThePostcode.

As an aid to visualising the data, I have used some code from Chris Lightfoot and fed it our data. You can see the results here. The database it uses is currently updated every hour. You can see the same code running on a complete (non-free) data set linked from this mySociety post.