Fellow Nestorianiacs,
We’ve just pushed live a minor change to our API. You can now request properties via the API and have them sorted by date, similar to the new feature we’re currently testing with some users. Full details of the Nestoria API, including change notes are available here. Have fun.Archive for September, 2007
Fellow Nestorvanians,
As you know, we’re constantly testing improvements to Nestoria. Typically this takes the form of showing different users slightly different implementations of the site. Sometimes however we need to make larger changes or completely new features. In the coming weeks we will be rolling out a few such improvements that we think will make finding your dream home even simpler. To test these bigger changes we’d like to first expose them to only a tiny group of friends and volunteers who can give us some initial feedback before we expose them to a much larger audience. If you’re interested in being in this group of beta testers please let us know via our feedback form. Please only volunteer if you can spare a few minutes to give new features a test drive. Many thanks. The first test will begin later this week.Fellow nestokies,
As is our wont, occasionally we test new features on some of our users to gather feedback and finetune before we role out new functionality to all of you. Sometimes these tests are to non-visual aspects of the site like our relevancy algorithms, but sometimes they are things that you can see. So don’t be alarmed if occasionally the old Nestoria property search interface that you know and (we hope) love, is sometimes a bit different. Yesterday we started another such test. Some users can now see the ‘age’ of a listing. By age we last saw material new information about a listing. We also allow you to sort by age (or ‘Date’ as we refer to it on the search results page)
If you’re in the test group please play with it and let us know how we can improve this new functionality.
Expect some more new features in the coming weeks…Ahoy!
Today is a very special day. Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Arrr, that’s right me’arties…
My fellow pirates in the Nestoria ship/office were thinking, why just talk like a pirate when you can live the pirate life too. Life would be so much easier - steal whenever you’re a little short of cash, drink plenty of grog and have a good hornpipe every now and then.
If all that sounds like a little too much effort, you should at least consider looking for your new abode in a town with historic pirate ties…
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Find yourself a ramshackle but charming abode in Penzance perhaps?
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Or maybe a suitably windswept residence in or around Greenock, believed to be the birthplace of William “Captain” Kidd.
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Purchase a property in Plymouth, departure point of the Pelican and globe-trotting pirate, Sir Francis Drake.
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Female pirate readers, delight in our listings of London, which spawned the notorious cross-dressing pirate, Mary Read.
Avast landlubbers, get ye house hunting!
Greetings Nestorites,
Since our post two weeks ago about density of homes for sale across the UK we’ve had several requests for the same visual display but for properties to let. Who are we to argue with the demands of our readers? The original image is available here, but we thought we’d use this as a chance not only to display some interesting geodata, but also to experiment with one of the coolest new geovisualization tools around: Yahoo!’s new MapMixer. MapMixer is a tool that allows anyone to easily overlay one map (in this case our image of UK rental properties) on top of another map (a traditional political map of Great Britian). Here’s the result: The overlay doesn’t line up perfectly, but the opacity slider has a definite “wow” factor (and we’re not just saying that because we also use Yahoo! sliders). See it in all it’s glory over on the MapMixer page. For those who are interested we’ve also posted maps of the distribution of property to buy and rent for Spain over on our Spanish blog.Hola Nestorianos,
It’s now been four months since we launched Nestoria in Spain and we thought it might be a good time to update you, our loyal readers, on our progress. On the one hand, we have seen a nice growth in usage (despite the fact that August is traditionally a holiday month in Spain). On the other hand it is clear we still have a lot to learn. As you know, we continually track many, many metrics to try to understand how we could make the experience of finding a house to buy or rent even easier. We divide these metrics into a few broad topics that we’ll go into here.- Comprehensiveness: we’re very happy to report that we’ve grown a lot since our launch. Our database now contains over 550,000 properties to rent and buy from great partners like Atrea-BBVA, Globaliza, Idealista, Inzoco, Ivive, Kyero, Portae, SacaCasa, Suvivienda (El Mundo), Urbaniza, Yaencontre. Many thanks to all of our partners for their trust in working with a start up. We hope the list will continue to grow in the coming months
- Relevancy: We believe relevancy consists of two pieces. Correctly determining the location you are interested in, and then determining the best properties to show you for that area. We have had to learn a great deal about Spanish geography. A very, very simplistic example: the metro station Bilbao in Madrid is not the same thing as the city Bilbao. These are the core challenges a property search engine needs to dominate, and one we work on continually. Of course, once we have identified the correct area, we then need to fine tune Nestoria Rank our ranking algorithm.
- Usability: By usability we mean is the site fast, understandable, and easy to use. We’re continually working on improving these things. We were very pleased to see our homepage gets a score of 94 (out of 100) using yslow the new speed measuring tool from Yahoo!. Like in the UK, we’ve recently rolled out improved slider technology Specifically for Spain we’ve added more local content; property searchers are now able to see nearby train stations and hospitals. Just like in the UK we’ve also built new ways to access Nestoria, like our google mapplet and our Facebook application - which we believe was the world’s first non-English Facebook application. We know the work on usability is never finished. We can always make the site faster and easier to use. We also know we don’t have all the answers, which is why we offer our API to allow everyone to experiment with different ways of presenting Nestoria results. Our recent Hack contest was won by two Spanish developers.
One of the aspects of Nestoria that we get the most comments about is our integration of maps with property and local information. New developments in the online mapping world are of keen interest to us, and so it’s with pleasure that we today interview Artem Pavlenko, creator of Mapnik - a free toolkit for developing mapping applications.
Artem is an independent software developer and consultant specializing in all things ‘mapping’ based in Oxford, UK. He got involved in GEO in 1996 when he joined Cadcorp as a developer. Since then he has worked with many clients and projects including Infotech Enterprises and more recently Yotta. His main interest now is FOSS software development. Artem, thanks for agreeing to speak with us 1. Explain the idea behind Mapnik.When I started Mapnik about two years ago, there wasn’t any Open Source software around which would produce ‘good looking maps’. Most projects were GIS orientated, meaning all efforts would go into supporting OGC standards and quality of rendering or cartography tended to be overlooked.
This situation changed when Google Maps arrived. Their maps looked good, worked well and everybody liked them. Being an independent developer I wanted a toolkit I could use in my daily work to make maps like that, so I started Mapnik. 2. Where is Mapnik used?Mapnik is a relatively young project, but it has already a few users worldwide. It’s mainly used to create custom maps for the web. Here are some examples: 10east.com who are also hosting mapnik.org, use Mapnik to render maps for their Bolt-On-Maps service. Kosmosnimki is a Moscow based company whose aim is to create a mosaic of satellite imagery covering the entire Russian territory. They use Mapnik to render a topographic map of Russia. Others include Heritage Walks in Auckland, Freemap for walkers in the UK, Placebase, UK Cycle Map and of course OpenStreetMap.
3. What’s next for Mapnik? There are lots of ideas. I started some work on a GUI which I hope will allow more people to get involved in online cartography. I’m also planning to add more comprehensive styling capabilities, improve text rendering and more besides. One of the critiques about Mapnik is a lack of documentation - I’m hoping to improve in this area. Mapnik is a collaborative effort and if you’re a developer or just have some ideas do get in touch. 4. What are your thoughts on the developments in the online geography sector (maps, etc) in the last 18 months? Is that when GMap arrived? I think there was a dramatic change in the last 18 months. Suddenly everyone realised (almost) everything can have a location attached, and as a result on-line mapping has become a vibrant area. Also I think we’re getting to the stage when mobile based mapping devices will be a hot spot. I can quite easily imagine walking along a street anywhere in the UK and receiving location based information, not to mention ’spam’ on my mobile phone, just because its has GPS, Wifi etc. 5. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces? Perhaps, providing the best possible user experience, which most certainly will include on-line mapping, is a big challenge. Users are getting more sophisticated and they want to see more detailed, more up-to-date and more personalised maps while looking for property to buy or to let. Is there a school near-by, how easy is it to get to the train station on a bike… Community based efforts to collect data like OpenStreetMap can play a big role in this area. And tools like Mapnik could help to visualise this data. Thanks Artem, you’re right, providing the best possible user experience is a big challenge. It’s exactly that challenge that lead us to start Nestoria. For those interested in following Mapnik’s progress please subscribe to the Mapnik news feed. past Nestoria interviews: Harvey Edgecombe, Marc Wick, Nick Black.Nestoranians,
we know there are few things you dread more than a few days without the chance to learn more about your favourite UK property search engine so we thought we’d highlight some recent coverage of Nestoria on other blogs that you might not normally read.- Recently launched PerlBuzz profiled some of the technology that makes Nestoria work.
- Last week I took some time for an interview with international property blog Nubricks. The questions were great and gave me a good chance to describe some of the difficult challenges we focus our efforts on. Listen to the podcast here.
- Two sites that profile up and coming start ups recently wrote about us. AltSearchEngines focuses on new developments in the word of search, while KillerStartups takes a broaders look at internet start ups across all sectors.
Big thanks to everyone for helping to spread the word about Nestoria. Hopefully this will sate your appetite for Nestoria news for a few more days.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend.Greetings Nestopathians,
You may have noticed a short lull in Nestoria development last week as most of the team decamped to Vienna to attend YAPC Europe 2007. For those not in the know, “The Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPCs) are grassroots symposia on the Perl programming language coordinated by The Perl Foundation”. The European event is the biggest annual Perl gathering on the continent, and this year’s was the most well-attended to date with about 400 participants. The Perl community is big, growing, and very active and we’re happy to be part of it both as consumers (most of Nestoria is built with Perl) and contributors (Nestoria engineers maintain several CPAN modules and have plans to add more).
Although the enthusiastic keynote presentations by Larry Wall (father of Perl) and Damian Conway (uncle of Perl?) were very inspiring, and the content of the many talks comprehensive and instructive, it was the informal chats between presentations and over coffees and beers that will really stick. There is a big ecosystem of open source tools and projects out there, and nothing beats the advice of the experienced when it comes to choosing what software to use and how best to use it. The Nestoria team left the conference full of fresh ideas and with a pile of notes to digest.
A big thanks to the YAPC Europe organizers and participants. Hope to see you next year in Copenhagen.
Nestoria Fans!
As you know from recent posts, lately we’ve been thinking a lot about the mountain of data the Nestoria search engine generates. We’ve had a bit of feedback that bar charts and pie graphs might not be the most interesting way to represent geographic data (Steve, we hear you - maps are cool). We hope to unveil some interesting ways to look at and draw conclusions for the data in due time. Nevertheless, here’s a bit of a teaser we whipped up today by overlaying our database of half a million homes for sale on a plot of the UK:
Join the 
