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New OSM Maps on Nestoria with Cloudmade

Dear Nestorfuns,

Our true fans will know the "geo fun" feature that allows you to use our property search with OSM Maps.

Viral_panel

I am happy to report that we have updated this feature with brand new, customized maps curtesy of Cloudmade. Cloudmade allows you to create your own designs for OSM maps and integrate them on your website via their API.

Check out Spitalfields, London:

(download)

 


We are very pleased with the result, big thank you to the people at Cloudmade!

We hope you'll have fun playing with this new feature. Have a nice bank holiday weekend!

 

 

 

 

Filed under  //  fun   new features   openstreetmap   technical  
Comments (2)
Posted by nomsa 
 

Care for a game?

Hello Nestoria fans,

As you know we're always working hard to help you find your next property. And, although alarmist cries of a national obesity crisis may suggest the opposite, we know that for many people sport is a defining part of their lives.

We're pleased to announce we've partnered with leading UK local sport site Sportsbase to help home searchers find their dream home beside the pitch, court, or club.

Here's an example. Let's imagine you're searching for a flat to rent in Aberdeen:
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You can now easily plot locations of sport facilities near your prospective future home. You'll notice we've used a football as the distinctive sport 'pin' to overlay on the map.
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Rest assured however, we welcome property search fans of all sports - cricket, rugby, gymnastics, athletics, yes, even archery.

So, whether you're looking for home near a spot in the scrum or a flat with easy access to the golf course, Nestoria is now the place to find it. Who knows, do well and maybe in 2012 you'll need to use Nestoria to find a flat to rent in East London?

Happy house hunting.

Filed under  //  new features  
Comments (0)
Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Search by property characteristics live

Greetings Nestorlonians!

We've just launched a new property search functionality in test mode. Some Nestoria users will now begin seeing a slightly different layout that gives you access to a new feature: ability to search by property characteristics. For example you can now search for a flat in Putney with a garden - or Grade II property in North Shropshire. Ok, that's cool. But that's not all - you can also select characteristics of a property that you don't want to have. For example maybe you want to rent a flat in Maida Vale that's not 'lower ground floor' and not an ex-council flat. No problem, search away. We offer lots of other common features that you can either include or exclude from your search. Things like 'parking', 'high ceilings', 'furnished or unfurnished', 'freehold or leasehold', 'basement' and more.

One challenge we've grappled with in rolling out this new feature is how to present so many options while still maintaining the simplicity and cleanness that we know you love. We're not sure we've found the optimal solution, but here's what we've come up with:

By default most of the search options are hidden away:

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By clicking on the 'more search options' link on the right above the map a menu opens giving you easy access to more complex filters:

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We've been testing various versions of this functionality for the past few weeks, and we're excited to finally get it out. For those of you in the random test, please let us know what you think. For the others please have a bit of patience - we'll gather feedback, make improvements, and then roll this feature out to everyone.

Big thanks to two groups of people: our diligent beta testers who provided great feedback, and the hard working code slingers behind the Yahoo! User Interface library and the ydn-javascript support list.

More beta tests coming soon! Enjoy the weekend.

Filed under  //  new features  
Comments (0)
Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Support for Google Earth KML Network links

Welcome Nestorooglers!

As we've covered before, the pace of innovation in online geography is relentless! Yesterday we witnessed another step forward: our friends at Google now allow dynamic data updates via their maps API. This means it's very simple to paste a dynamically updating map with property onto any web page.

Never ones to sit on the geodata sidelines, we've whipped up support for this in our Nestoria KML feed, as you can see below with this example of homes for sale in Canterbury (note: it will take a few seconds to load). Drag the map and watch properties 'automagically' appear.

Very cool, and very easy - the entire code is below, literally 3 lines.

Nice work Google! Keep the innovation coming.

For those of you looking for another alternative to KML you can of course check out our standard Dropin Maps.

Filed under  //  new features  
Comments (0)
Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Sort by newness now live for everyone

Fellow members of the Nestorese empire,

As devout readers of this blog will know, for the last week we've been testing 'sort by newness' on some users. The feedback and metrics are very positive and today we've rolled this feature out to everyon. Enjoy.

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Of course, the end of one test is the start of another. The new test is an algorithmic change and thus not 'visible' in the traditional sense. We hope that you're finding homes to buy and rent faster than ever.

Filed under  //  new features  
Comments (0)
Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Limit your property search to new homes

Fellow Nestorfarians,

A few moments ago we pushed a new feature live allowing you to limit your search only to new build homes. Here you can see it on the homepage:

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or here on a results page if you search for new homes near Leeds:

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As ever we face the difficulty of presenting more filtering options and more information despite wanting to keep a very simple, clean, easy to use interface. Not easy. Nevertheless we hope this strikes the right balance for those of you searching for a new home. On a related new feature note, many thanks to everyone who got in touch about becoming a beta tester. We hope to begin this week, and adding more filtering options is one of the things we'll be testing first.

As with every product enhancement, please let us know what you think.

Filed under  //  new features  
Comments (0)
Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Beta testers needed

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.

Filed under  //  new features   technical  
Comments (0)
Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Sorting by 'newness'

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)

Media_httpstaticnesto_tcnei
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...

Filed under  //  new features  
Comments (0)
Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Keep on Slidin'

Greetings Nestorinians!

We've just pushed out a round of design changes designed to make it even simpler for you to find your dream home. Specifically, we've switched to using Yahoo's excellent YUI design library to render our sliders. This will hopefully solve a few rendering issues in different browsers that we've become aware of, and about which we're dreadfully sorry.

Please have a look and play with the new sliders and let us know what you think. Here's a screenshot of a search for a 2 bed home in Clifton:

Media_httpstaticnesto_bpbay

Big thanks to all the helpful voices on the ydn-javascript group. The sheer volume of cool projects out there using YUI and the willingness of people to help are fantastic. I advise anyone looking at doing some cool client side scripting to look at YUI.

OK, enough blather about layout. Try it out now.

Filed under  //  new features  
Comments (0)
Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

May we make a suggestion...

Nestocheks!

A quick note to celebrate an important milestone here at Nestoria. It seems so many people are searching for Nestoria that we've made it into Google's default search suggestion index! Try it out over at Google Suggest or see this screenshot.

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Autosuggeston is one of the original AJAX showcases that defined the advent of the 'web2.0' experience, and we've had it here at Nestoria since we launched:

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Of course, searching from our homepage isn't everyone's cup of tea. If instead you like searching directly from your browser, as many Firefox users do, I can also recommend the Nestoria Firefox search plugin:

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it's just one of the many tools we offer to make it simple for people to search for homes. As always, please let us know how you think we're doing.

Filed under  //  new features  
Comments (0)
Posted by Nestoria UK