I Built a Free Open Data Site for My Town

For the last couple of months a lot of my spare time has gone into Cheltenham Open Data. It started because I wanted one place to check things about where I live: house prices, planning applications, fuel prices, flood warnings, bus disruption. All of it is public, but it’s scattered across council PDFs, government spreadsheets and APIs that nobody outside a dev team would ever look at. So it pulls everything together and refreshes on a schedule. Fuel prices update hourly, care home ratings monthly, and plenty in between. A Raspberry Pi does the frequent jobs now, after GitHub Actions turned out to run my “hourly” job once or twice a day. A few rules I set myself: Free to use, with no accounts and no paywall. No tracking cookies. No ad tech, anonymised cookie-free stats, and newsletter addresses never shared with anyone. Plain English. Each page should answer a question a normal person might actually have. The bit I’m still working out is how to pay for it. The plan is a handful of…