Archive for the 'tools' Category

Nestoria tools in the wild

Published by Ed on April 8, 2008 in tools. 0 Comments

Greetings Nestorwegians!

Today we thought we’d feature some sites out there across ‘the internets’ using the Nestoria webmaster tools. For those that don’t know we offer a full array of widgets, property lists, dropin maps, co-branding tools, an even a full API to allow webmesters to offer their users relevant property information.

Here’s an example of our easy to set up co-branded property search in action on regional site this is Hartlepool.

nestoria cobranded search on thisishartlepool.co.uk

Moving on to a slightly more glamourous region (no offense intended to our much loved Hartlepudlian readers), we also recently came across our API being used on About Mayfair, a site about London’s poshest district (no offense intended to our occasionally beloved Chelsea readers).

So whether your site’s readers are hunting for a multi-million pound mansion on the edge of Hyde Park or a more affordable cottage by the sea we’ve got the tools to help you offer a compelling property search experience.

As always, we’re grateful for any feedback about our tools, especially our most recently launched historic house price widget.

Nestoria hListing support

Published by Ed on April 3, 2008 in New Features, technical and tools. 5 Comments

Fellow Nestoris!

For some time now momentum on the internet has slowly been building for microformats and the semantic web.

More and more these data formats and technologies are moving from theory to reality, with recent adoption from internet giants like Yahoo! to innovative start ups like London-based Retangle (still invite only). The most recent beta version of popular internet browser Firefox supports microformats and may be a key step on the path to much wider adoption.

microformats

We here at Nestoria always have our eyes open for any possible new technology or technique that may help you find your next home more easily. Today we continue this tradition by rolling out support for the hListing microformat on our search result pages.

We should note, the format is still under proposal, and to our knowledge there’s only one known in-the-wild parser - so this is bleeding edge stuff that might be useful in the future rather than an amazing new functionality for property searchers today. Nevertheless, even the mightiest oak grows from the tiny acorn. No doubt future microformat application developers are grateful to find live examples. We look forward to playing our party in the future growth of the semantic web.

If interested, read about our other efforts to support open standards and the open source development community.

Embeddable House Price Charts

Published by Ed on March 18, 2008 in New Features and tools. 8 Comments

Hail Nestorcrats!

In these chaotic times of stock market ups and downs (good thing my contract stipulates that I be paid in gold bullion), it’s only natural that people are focused on the price of their most valuable asset: their home. A few weeks ago we asked you for feedback regarding the best way to display house price trends over time. Many thanks to those of you who came forward with your helpful suggestions.

Today we’re pleased to announce the newest version of our house price widget is now live. Using the recently released Google Charts API (thanks Google!) we’re able to

nestoria house prices widget

Adding the widget to your website or blog is literally as simple as cut and paste. Do a search on Nestoria for any area in the UK and at the bottom of the page there will be a link to ‘House Prices Widget’. Click on that link and you’ll be shown a page where you can get the chunk of code to cut and paste onto your website. Full details can be found on the house price widget page in our webmaster tools

Indeed, the first examples of the new widget have already been spotted ‘in the wild’. Here’s a screenshot from Lavenderhill.co.uk, a site, as the name suggests, about the Lavender Hill area of South London:

nestoria house price widget on Lavender Hill site

Of course, if you are traditionalist, you’ll be very pleased to know that we continue to support the original house price widget format, as seen here:

nestoria house prices widget

and for those who disagree with our design decisions, you of course have full access to the raw data itself via our API.

We are considering rolling out other widget designs in the future, so please do keep sending us your feedback. Likewise, we’re happy to feature other examples of the widget in the wild. Let us know.

Best of luck to all of you in these uncertain times (hint: buy gold!).

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 powers CityAM Property Search

Published by Ed on January 29, 2008 in partnerships and tools. 0 Comments

Greetings Nestoriaks!

Following last week’s announcement of our recent partnership with The Independent, today we announce another use of Nestoria property search by a newspaper. Recently financial paper CityAM, a daily distributed for free in the City of London (as the name would suggest), launched their website. We’re proud to announce that they make use of our co-branded property search tool to offer their visitors a compelling UK property search experience.

So, let’s imagine you’re a time strapped young go-getter, looking for a luxury flat on the Southbank so you can stroll across the Millenium Bridge before starting a day of wheeling and dealing. Check out CityAM’s property search and you’ll find what you need:

Nestoria property search on CityAM

If on the other hand you’re a veteran trader who managed to squirrel away a few billion (yes that’s a B, not an M) in the recent market ‘corrections’, then you’ll probably want to look somewhere a bit more up market. Say perhaps homes in Chelsea over £1,000,000.

Regardless of whether you’re lighting your cigars with 500 Euro notes (“they just taste better”) or not, do give the new CityAM site a look. If you like the Nestoria integration, and would like to have the same for your website, let us know or just take a look at our various tools for webmasters.

Enjoy!

OpenID support

Published by Ed on January 10, 2008 in tools and web 2.0. 1 Comment

Fellow Nestoriquois,

as avid tech blog readers you’ve no doubt noticed more and more support for OpenID, a distributed single sign on system, across the internet. Indeed there are signs that Yahoo! will soon join the fun and rumours that Google will also begin supporting the standard.

With such giants of the internet putting their weight behind this project, who are we to not jump on this open standard internet bandwagon?

So, last night, as the rest of you slept blissfully, our crack team of blog software management specialists found and successfully installed the openID WordPress plugin, so you can now comment your heart out here on the Nestoria blog after authenticating via openID.

openID for commenting on blog

Big thanks to all the WordPress plugin developers of the world. We love you for making our lives so easy.

And for you gentle reader, enjoy! We look forward to reading your comments.

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)

House price widgets for your blog or website

Published by Ed on November 23, 2007 in New Features and tools. 6 Comments

Nestoria fans,

Almost since the day we started Nestoria we’ve had requests for general information about the state of the housing market particularly average house prices. We made access to our data available via the API as soon as we could, but we know not everyone relishes the technical challenge of mucking about with raw data.

Today we’re happy to announce a very simple widget that will allow anyone to display information about average house prices for any area in the UK on their blog or website.

Here’s an example: say you wanted to show the readers of your site the average house prices in Islington:


It’s now as easy as cut and paste!

Some common questions

  • Where do I get the widget for my area?
    Go to any search results page on Nestoria. At the bottom is a link to the House price widget for that area.
  • Will more display formats be added?
    Yes! Soon.
  • Will historical trends be added?
    Yes! Soon.
  • I have more questions! Where can I get answers?
    Read the full house price widget help page or send us feedback

As devoted Nestoria fans will know, the new house price widgets are of course just one of many tools for webmasters we offer. If you like the house price widget, please check out the others.

Enjoy!

UK rental property density

Published by Ed on September 18, 2007 in tools and what's hot. 1 Comment

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.

How YSlow sees Nestoria - 94/100

Published by Ed on July 31, 2007 in technical and tools. 8 Comments

Nestorinians,

We’re always hard at work on making it as quick and easy as possible to find a home to buy or let. Usability is a tricky concept. What one person likes, another dislikes. There is one thing everyone seems to agree on though: they want the internet, and especially search engines, to be as fast as possible.

As such we’re continually on the lookout for ways to speed up Nestoria. We were pleased to read about the recent release of YSlow, a tool from Yahoo! for measuring performance flaws. The tool is great in it’s simplicity, and also pleasing in that there’s a wealth of documentation that actually explains the logic behind the recommendations.

Unfortunately, YSlow won’t help us make Nestoria much faster because we’re already hitting a score of 94 out of 100 on our homepage.

screenshot of YSlow

The areas we could improve would be to use a CDN or ‘content delivery network’ like Akamai, but sadly that’s not really an option (or even needed) for a lean and mean start up like Nestoria.

Nevertheless, rest assured, dear Nestoria user, that we’re always doing our best to make the site as fast as possible. We’ve got a few more tricks planned for the coming weeks, which should hopefully ensure your search for your next home will be served up as quickly as possible.

BTW, as one of several Yahoo! alumni in the Nestoria team, it’s very cool to see yet another bit of coolness (see our coverage of Y! Pipes and the Nestoria Yahoo! Hack Day) from the kids in Sunnyvale. Keep it up.

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