UK Postcodes with Google Maps
Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on a project for a friend, which required me to use Google Maps to locate houses. If you have used Google Maps before you will know that you can just type in a postcode and it will take you there. Google Maps offers an API so that you can use the power of Google Maps on your own web site, but you can’t just tell it to put a marker on a specific postcode.
Personally I would have thought that putting a marker on a postcode would have been included, as it’s on of the core features of Google Maps, but it might be due to some licensing issue with Royal Mail. Instead you have to give it the longitude and latitude of a location you want to mark on the map, which is fine if you happen to remember all your locations this way! I myself prefer using postcodes, which why I found a free database of the first part of UK postcodes (which included longitude and latitude) so I tied Google Maps in with the MySQL postcode database.
A working demo can be found under the scripts section.
I have also released it for free so you can get your hands it.
In other news I got my new 60GB iPod video in black will post some photos soon. Videos look pretty cool on it, but I would have thought that the TV output would be very pixelated as the video file is only 320×240, but it looks ok and you could easily watch a movie from it.
This weeks recommended album is We Have Sound by Tom Vek and Pete Tong’s Podcast is pretty good too!
