Send your questions to FindMyCrib@gmail.com
What is the purpose of this tool?
findaproperty.co.uk is a great website that provides lots of property advertisements from a variety of different estate agents. The problem is, you only want to see the properties for the area in which you want to live. This tool allows you to plot all the propereties from a specific area on a map, so you can see exactly where they are in relation to schools, stores, stations, etc... Other than scraping the site for information, FindMyCrib.com is not associated in any way with findaproperty.co.uk.
How does it work?
When you enter a query string, our script goes to findaproperty.co.uk and queries it for the options you selected. The results are parsed, the information is sorted and each property is plotted on a google map. For the Iphone interface all properties are dumped to a .kml file which can then be pulled up from map.app on the Iphone.
Why do some queries take so long?
When you query findaproperty.co.uk it only returns up to 30 responses and you have to click the next page to see the rest of the properties matching your search criteria. The findmycrib tool parses each page of 30 properties and plots them all on a map. For example, if your query returns 120 properties, the findmycrib tool will actually parse 4 pages of results, geocode them, and plot them on a map. Basically the longer it takes the more properties match your query. If you are getting more than 100 hits you probably need to narrow your options (price, type, bedrooms).
Why doesn't 'Load Map' find anything
Unfortuately this web server lives on my mac-mini via dhcp based dsl line. This means my IP address changes periodically and although the dns changes dynamically, there seems to be an issue with google holding onto the dns longer than most dns servers. This means that when google looks for the kml file on my server (only way to load info into map.app as far as i can tell) it can't find it because it is resolving to the previous IP. I am looking at ways to remedy this but at the moment I am at the mercy of google.