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:
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 appologise 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.
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 7th 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 7thth 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.