For several years I worked as a web developer for the Ramblers and this experience very much colours my view of todays release of free maps and postcode data.

This is a fantastic and significant step in the direction of ensuring that some of the worlds best mapping assets do the most good for society as a whole.

I’ve been working on a couple of open data projects recently - which has been very rewarding.

A couple of people have asked for some code so I’ve knocked up a quick version of the sort of thing I’ve been working on.

This code requires PHP 5.1 for the JSON functions but doesn’t need any extra libraries (pecl_http can give better error messages but is a bit of a pain to install).

The Notes field in packages returns output in Markdown format - you can convert this to HTMl with a parser available at http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown

This isn’t production code so please test before using.