Archive for July, 2006

Beer In The Evening

Published by Ahmed on July 31, 2006 in New Features, about us and search. 0 Comments

In this blog post, I’d like to draw your attention to some of the local content that we can display along with property listings. Specifically, pubs in the area you’re searching in!

We’ve teamed up with BeerInTheEvening.com to help you pick a new home that’s within walking distance of a highly-rated pub!

When you’re on a results page, if you look to the lower-right of the page, you will see a few tabs, with headings like ‘Census’, ‘Health’, ‘Photos’. A little further along is ‘Pubs’!

If you click on ‘Pubs’, you will see that several green markers appear on the map, allowing you to pin-point your soon-to-be local! A list of the pubs is also displayed, sorted in order of user ratings (10 being an incredible pub that you simply must visit, 0-1 being a pub that probably won’t be around much longer).

Clicking on a pub name will take you to the listing for that watering house on the webite of our fantastic partners, where you will be able get lots of info on your chosen establishment and read user’s comments.

Cheers!

Use us

Published by Ed on July 25, 2006 in New Features, search and tools. 0 Comments

Do you own a website or write a blog? Do you think that users of your site may benefit from searching Nestoria?

If so, we’ve just made things a whole lot easier for you to give your visitors what they want:

Search Boxes!

Search Box

When copied and pasted into your pages, these nifty little bits of HTML display a Nestoria search box! This allows users to search Nestoria from right there on your site. Users can enter any search term and choose whether they want to buy or to rent.

We even have three different styles to choose from, allowing you to choose that which is best suited to your pages.

Still warm: Get your search boxes

Yahoo! There’s a Widget!

Published by Ahmed on July 24, 2006 in New Features, tools and web 2.0. 0 Comments

Fresh from the Nestoria presses: The Nestoria Yahoo! Widget

Those of you who know what this is can go here right away and get searching!

For everyone left wondering "what on earth is a widget, and a Yahoo! one at that", read on…

/wijit/
noun informal a small gadget or mechanical device.
- The Oxford English Dictionary

Whilst the above may be the official meaning of 'widget', it isn't really applicable in this particular case. A widget in the computing world has come to represent a small interface to a service - and they tend to run in their own special environments - in this case, Yahoo! Widgets.

You download the main Yahoo! Widgets program (from here) - follow the installation instructions. This will then place several attractive widgets on your desktop - such as a small clock and a small widget showing the weather. You can turn these off by right clicking on them and selecting the appropriate option.

Of course, what you're really interested in is the Nestoria widget - which you can download from here. Having installed the widget, it will be placed on your desktop along with the other Yahoo! Widgets, enabling easy access to Nestoria search facilities at all times. Perfect.

Supercalifragalistic…

Published by Ed on July 20, 2006 in New Features and tools. 0 Comments

…expialidocious

Features, features, personalisation features.

Some sites want to throw personalisation options at you - save your favourite search, save your favourite property, save your favourite pair of underpants - but don’t forget to register first (name, telephone number, marital status, hair colour).

At the minute, we don’t provide you with any such features (although you could always use the ’send as email’ option to email properties to yourself, or use RSS).

However, we would really like to offer you some further options - and to make them the most useful and best integrated out there.

We should be adding things such as a property shortlist in the not too distant future - but, as ever, we’d be grateful for any feedback or direction our users wish to provide - so please get in touch!

Deep Linking

Published by Ed on July 14, 2006 in search, technical and tools. 0 Comments

We know that people looking for property online like to be able to share their searches - be that in an e-mail, or on a blog, over the phone - whatever. That’s one of the reasons why the team here at Nestoria decided that we should make the URL (the www.nestoria.co.uk/whatever bit) easy to read and easy to modify - to change your search.

Most other sites have URLs like: www.site.com/search.ext?as=239207&sd=jahsdasd

That’s not useful to your average site user - imagine trying to tell someone that over the phone! We believe that our links are easy to read and understand - for exampe, the following link:

http://www.nestoria.co.uk/hammersmith/property/buy/minbed-2/maxprice-600000

Would search in Hammersmith, for flats and houses to buy, with a minium of 2 bedrooms, costing less that ??600,000 - easy?

You can find more information on this ‘Deep Linking’ (so called because the links are to pages deep within the site) on our ‘Linking to Nestoria‘ page

RSS - Really Simple Syndication

Published by Ed on July 10, 2006 in technical and tools. 2 Comments

There’s a lot of information out there on the web - billions of pages on millions of sites that you may or may not be interested in. You probably have a few favourite sites that you like to read on a regular basis - to keep up with the latest news or developments. That can become a bit of a chore - checking a few or ten or thirty sites a day.

If you’re one of these people, RSS may be your saviour - if you’re not, it may still be a useful tool! Nestoria has RSS built in, which means (if you follow the steps outlined below) that you can get the latest property listings for the search you are interested in delivered straight to your computer!

RSS (which stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’) is a new way of displaying and delivering website content.

To get started, you need a ‘News Reader’ - there are many available (try a google search). Your news reader will automatically collect all the latest information from sites that you ’subscribe’ to.

You normally subscribe to a website by clicking on a button representing the RSS feed (normally RSS Original or RSS - Recent logo) - then following the normal steps for your news reader.

Once you have subscribed to a site, you can then read all the latest information right there in your news reader, without having to navigate to the site first.

As we all know - time is money (or time better spent doing something fun, like playing tiddlywinks).

Try doing a search for property now - as detailed as you like (e.g. 2 Bed flats and houses in Highbury, Costing less that ??400,000), then click on the orange ‘RSS’ button to the top right - you’ll then get the latest results for this search without having to go to the site again and again!
You can also subscribe to this blog by using the orange ‘RSS’ button to the right.

If you have any problems, or this wasn’t clear, please comment below.

Anyone need a pint?

Published by Ed on July 6, 2006 in technical. 1 Comment

If you can, please join us tonight at the John Snow pub in Soho. We’re sponsoring this month’s London Perl Mongers meeting.

As heavy users of the computer language perl we’re glad we have a chance to give back to the perl community. Of course, it’s not totally altruistic. We’re hopeful we’ll be able to get some feedback on Nestoria.

We’ll see you there

Bring your own map - we now have an API!

Published by Ed on July 6, 2006 in API, New Features, technical and tools. 0 Comments

A few days ago we added GeoRSS to our site - a relatively little known way of associating items in an RSS feed to their physical locations. Within hours this had been used to create a mashup combining the weather and properties in Islington.

We did not expect that…

Today we are launching the first version of our API. This will let you easily search property listings. Not only do you get where the property is but you also get a thumbnail, details of the property and a link for more information.

We are making this data freely available (subject to a few conditions) because we hope that there is an appetite for it. Getting all the listings together and keeping them up to date is not trivial and we don’t want this to prevent you from doing great things with it.

There is a sweepstake in the office as to what you will do with this data, but I don’t think that we have been imaginative enough. Go forth, have fun and let us know here what you come up with.

We’re Hiring

Published by Ed on July 5, 2006 in about us. 0 Comments

It turns out that making a property search engine is a lot of work. We need some help.

We’re currently recruiting for two internship roles to start 1 August.

If you’re the right candidate we look forward to hearing from you.

Tasty Bookmarks

Published by Ed on July 3, 2006 in technical and tools. 1 Comment

If you’ve been searching on Nestoria (or looking at any other website) on more than one computer at a time (e.g. at Work and at Home), you know what a pain it is to bookmark something in your browser, only to switch computers and spend 20 minutes trying to remember what that amazing site/search you bookmarked was, before giving up.

Del.icio.us bookmarks solve this problem - when you see the blue and black check icon

Delicious Logo
on a the upper right of a Nestoria page, click it to save the search as a bookmark on Del.icio.us - a website - accessible from any internet browser, on any computer.

Doing this has lots of other benefits - you can ‘tag’ your bookmarks - e.g. tag Nestoria with ‘UK’ and ‘Property’ perhaps? This groups your bookmarks and lets others search for new sites with these tags (if you decide to share your bookmarks - you can keep them away from prying eyes if you so choose).

You can also see what other people have been tagging with a particular tag - this might help you to discover new property sites you never knew about!

Deliciously simple and useful!