Archive for the 'API' Category

House prices widget - feedback needed

Published by Ed on February 12, 2008 in API, New Features and tools. 2 Comments

Greetings fellow members of the Nestorinese Empire,

today we need your help. As we announced a few weeks ago, we now offer historic house price data via our API. As an addition to the existing Nestoria house price widget - which shows the current average asking price for an area - we will soon be launching a widget that shows historic price trends for any area.

The problem we face is the same one we are confronted with in designing our property search results page: on the one hand we have a wealth of information, on the other hand we need a simple intuitive way to present it for the benefit of users. Thus, we turn to you, our loyal blog readers, for some help. Please let us know what you think of the following potential designs (note that the data is made up in all cases).

potential widget designs

As you can see each design has some pros and some cons. Some show more information, some less. Feel free to give us all the feedback you have. Perhaps you think these are all rubbish and you’d like to see something else altogether? Regardless of your opinion, many thanks for your help. We do value all the contributions we get, even if we can’t act on all of them immediately.

For those readers new to Nestoria, this widget will be just the most recent of our many tools for webmasters. Please check them out and let us know what you think.

Nestoria API: Fresher than ever.

Published by Ed on February 7, 2008 in API. 0 Comments

Greetings fellow Nestorites!

We know that one of the biggest complaints about searching for property on the internet is that the dream house you find is then gone when you contact the estate agent. This issue, we refer to it as freshness is a very difficult challenge. Without going into too much detail, the problem is not so much technical as it is simply refective of the dynamics of the industry.

Nevertheless, we are doing our part to solve it. We clearly label all of our listings with an indication of how old they are and a few months ago we began allowing users to sort listings by age. We know this doesn’t solve the actual problem, but we hope it’s a start.

Today we’ve extended the information we have about the listings age to our API. Each listing requested via the API now returns a field updated_in_days which is a number representing how many days since the listing last had a significant update like a change in price. The number is rounded to the nearest 12 hours (ie 0.5 would mean the listing is less than half a day old).

As ever, the full technical details can be found on our property search API help pages. Please contact us with any questions you have regarding the API (or anything else for that matter)

Enjoy!

Nestoria API - historic average price data, rental widgets

Published by Ed on January 15, 2008 in API and New Features. 3 Comments

Greetings Nestoronians!

A few updates about the Nestoria API. Specifically, the average house price data we launched a few months ago has now been augmented in two ways. First of all, we now return not just monthly price averages, but also quarterly price averages. Secondly we are now returning data for multiple months. This means it would now be easy to make cool graphs showing price trends over time, using the new Google Charts API or YUI Charts library (or, obviously, some other visualization technology of your choice).

We’ve seen some interesting experiments with the average house price data, the most notable of which is Precio de vivienda by Jesús Barrio in Spain. His tool uses our API to allow anyone to compare house prices in any two cities in Spain and displays them via a Google Chart. A very nice and useful site well worth checking out, and one we’d love to see someone emulate for the UK. Here’s a screenshot:

Unfortunately right now we’re only offering the historic data for the UK, but rest assured our ace team of data crunchers are hard at work compiling this data for Spain as well and it will soon be available.

A few other related announcements:

By popular demand we now support rental price widgets. See an example showing the average prices for rentals in Islington. Learn all about our average house price widgets for your blog or website.

Also, we’re aware that the external link to the PHP library is, unfortunately, not working. I’ve been informed that it should be back online shortly. Apologies for the outage.

As always, enjoy the API and please keep the feedback coming.

Nestoria data in action - London Profiler

Published by Ed on December 20, 2007 in API, Google Maps and web 2.0. 3 Comments

Dearest Nestors,

Recently Alex Singleton of UCL’s Department of Geography got in touch with us to let us know about an amazing tool they’ve developed: London Profiler.

London Profiler screenshot

The tool is a great example of the advancements in online cartography in the last 2 years. The UCL team has overlayed all sorts of data sets as heat maps on a Google map of London. They’ve integrated the ability to overlay Nestoria KML feeds with all sorts of cool demographic data like educational achievement, and health. The data is incredibly detailed, literally down to the street.

The one that we found most interesting - E-society data that measures how ‘e-literate’ the local population is. Apparently Nestoria headquarters are in an area that is ‘E-marginalised’! We’ll work on improving our computer skills. Meanwhile London Profiler is an interesting tool we recommend any Londoner or anyone interested in cool cartographic data visualisation check out.

Know of other clever uses of Nestoria data? Please let us know.

Nestoria Yahoo! Widget version 2

Published by mtm on December 19, 2007 in API and tools. 1 Comment

Nestoria search results always ready and updated on your PC at the stroke of a key?

That is now possible with the new Nestoria Yahoo! Widget created by Oleg Lavrovsky unsing the Nestoria API. (Thanks a lot Oleg!)

Apple-computer users already know the Apple Dashboard. The Yahoo! Widgets are very similar *), but they work for both MS Windows and Apple computers. Once installed you also get a clock, calculator, weather, stock quotes and hundreds of other install-able applications accessible on your desktop. Oh, and the by pressing ‘F8′ on your keyboard you can show and hide them (I did say ’stroke of a key’ :) ).

The Nestoria Yahoo! Widget version 1 got downloaded 949 times. To install the new widget go to the Yahoo! Widget Gallery and search for ‘nestoria’. You will see a large yellow ‘Get it!’ button. Click it.

The widget can be minimized (just the searchbox), mini-view (shows 3 results) and full-view (shows 8 results). It allows sorting results by price, newest, relevancy and keeps a list of your previous searches.

screenshot of Nestoria Yahoo! Widget

screenshot of Nestoria Yahoo! Widget

All feedback is welcome.

*) There is some controversy if Apple just copied the ideas from Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets)

First PlugLondon event a success

Published by mtm on December 10, 2007 in API and events. 2 Comments

Dear Nest-h??kchen *

Saturday was the first PlugLondon event in central London. 50 software developers (and one web designer) met in the fancy Skype offices over pizza and beer. And then went to the pub for more … socialising.

We saw demos from MySociety, Ebay Europe Innovate, BBC Backstage, DAO-Consumer, Yahoo! Development center and Nestoria among others. The focus was clearly on presenting new projects and APIs and getting feedback from fellow programmers. Some projects are still alpha or closed so I can’t link to them :)

As for the Nestoria API presentation (slides): I’ve never had such focused questions and suggestions, e.g. how to find duplicate photos. Several people in the audience have used our API in the past, one is using it in a Yahoo! Pipes project to find a flat in Brighton right now.

PlugLondon #2 might have a different format. 3.5 hours on a Saturday afternoon was a bit short and there wasn’t enough time to chat between the demos. I’m looking forward to the next one!


(photos from codepo8’s Flickr stream)

* old German expression for last-born/youngest child in a family

Nestoria at LPW 2007

Published by astle on December 4, 2007 in API, events and technical. 4 Comments

Neskimos,

Nestoria was proud to be a sponsor of the 2007 London Perl Workshop for the second year. All four of our talks went down pretty well:

This year’s event was as good if not better than the last. Thanks to the organizers for pulling everything together - especially the beery pub meet-up after.

UKPropertyVision.com - ambient property browsing

Published by Ed on November 26, 2007 in API, Google Maps, fun and web 2.0. 4 Comments

Hello Nestormanos,

We know that many of you are advanced users perched over your keyboards (or iphones) at the bleeding edge of internet innovation. So you no doubt saw the trend over the last few months of ‘vision’ sites - starting with David Troy’s twittervision and flickrvision, and most recently copied by sites like Wikipedia Vision.

Like many of the most beautiful ideas - the concept is very simple. The vision sites hook into the API of the original site and display a continual stream of random data on a map. But the outcome is very powerful. It’s somehow very entertaining and soothing to watch the map glide from point to point in the continual stream of photos and locations.

We were thus delighted to see our own Nestoria API employed to create UK Property Vision. Here’s a screenshot, but to truly experience it you’ll simply have to click.

UKPropertyVision

For you property addicts out there, welcome to paradise. Kick back, grab a glass of something nice, and just let the homes dance across the screen.

No need to worry - here at Nestoria we’ll keep our laser sharp focus on delivering you a relevant results from our comprehensive database of homes. But we know a search engine like Nestoria isn’t the only way people want to look at property. It’s great to see a clever use of the API to present a different interface.

Enjoy!

Nestoria API - version 1.13

Published by Ed on November 22, 2007 in API. 0 Comments

Greetings Nestorlovakians,

version 1.13 of the Nestoria property API just went live. Two minor new features by popular demand. When requesting property listings (as opposed to metadata) you can now:

  • limit the results to only homes with photos


  • request ‘random’ sorting

One clarification on randomness - we’ve seen there is a bit of confusion. Via the API you can request a random location (in which case the response is a random place name somewhere in the UK or Spain depending on which database you’ve queried) OR you can request a specific location like ‘Brighton‘ but ask that the results be sorted in random order. I hope that clears that up. If you have questions, just ping us.

See the full change log and technical docs.

Enjoy!

Nestoria Techs at LPW 2007

Published by astle on November 6, 2007 in API, events and technical. 0 Comments

N3stor!ans,??

The Nestoria Tech team is four for four in talk proposals for the London Perl Workshop (LPW) 2007:

  • Marc Tobias is going to talk about what we have learned in providing a public API.
  • Ed will gather the kids around the campfire and tell a haunting ghost story about the perils of internationalis(z)ation.
  • Spiros has chosen to share a few passages from his collection of sonnets about??A/B testing (also known as “bucket” testing in some circles).
  • Mike??has to chosen??lead the audience in a song of praise for development infrastructure and discuss the joy and peril of code coverage, profiling, and benchmarking tools.

The other talks look to be of the same high standard as last year, so I encourage anyone with an interest in Perl to come along, if not just to nerd out a bit in the pub afterwards.?? A big thanks to the organizers.?? Hope to see you there.

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