Updates to zoomf
You may have noticed a few changes at zoomf lately. Over the last month or so the entire site has been given a face lift, that much is obvious. What is not so obvious are some of the less visible new features, such as GeoRss, Kml, better tag filtering, better sorting, better content and Opensearch plugins.
Since the geeky stuff never gets talked about on the main zoomf blog, i feel it is my duty to highlight it here.
- GeoRss - GeoRss is best described on the wikipedia page here. Basically we now put location data into our rss feeds, which can be used by all sorts of different applications, the most useful of which is google maps. If you paste any GeoRss enabled feed into the google maps search box it will instantly display the contents of that feed in the map. Check out my home town here. For anyone thats interested we also tag our RSS feed with photos using the Media RSS extensions.
- KML - Again its probably best to look on wikipedia. KML is the markup used by google earth, and many other applications such as google maps. You can either download the kml and open it with google earth, or paste the kml url into the google maps search bar (as with the rss url) to view the results either google earth or google maps respectively.
- Better tag filtering - The tag filtering (eg garden, victorian) now works as an OR query rather than an AND query as before. We felt this gave a better user experience as people can now search for properties on either the 1st or 2nd floor, which was previously impossible.
- Better sorting - You can now sort by price, number of bedrooms and freshness, both ascending and descending.
- Better content - Using the Geonames.org wikipedia web service we display a random wikipedia article based within 10km of your current search area on every zoomf results page. Check out my hometown results page and you will see wikipedia entries for such interesting places as Creswell Crags and Bolsover Castle. The webservice itself is straightforwards to implement and our thanks go to the people at Geonames.org for providing it free of charge.
- Opensearch plugins - Opensearch is yet again best described by wikipedia, however all you really need to know is that it lets users of firefox and internet explorer 7 (and
do a zoomf search from their browser. For firefox users, all you do is go to any zoomf page and click on the search engine selector icon in the top right corner (it probably has a big google ‘G’ in it), then click on ‘add Zoomf.com sales’ or ‘add Zoomf.com’ lets in the drop down bar. We even support search suggestions like google does. More details of how to do this will be posted to the main zoomf site as soon as we get chance.
Thats it for now, expect another geeky zoomf tech update when we bring back improved visual search in the next few weeks.
Richard
Tags: geonames.org, georss, kml, opensearch, Zoomf
