I apologize for the lack of search tips, but everything has been fixed now.

Also, I’ve worked out 99% of the bugs in the automated process that automagically updates records each Friday night. For now on you can check late Friday night, or early Saturday morning for that weeks sold properties now. The only exception to this is when the Chronicle forgets to put the data up on their website. (Which did happen a couple weeks ago.)

This is pretty exciting because it means I won’t have to remember anything, and the

data will get updated automagically. It also means that the new data will appear predictably at the same time each week for you. No more wondering when you can check out the latest sales in your neighborhood.

Our data is updated now. Enjoy. 

Today I used my own site, BayAreaSoldHomes.com, to check out the properties that are selling in my neighborhood, and there’s no data for this past week!

Ugh.

As it turns out, the San Francisco Chronicle never updated their information.

So, my automated process to update my data hummed along, and didn’t get any data because there wasn’t any. I suppose this is a lesson that I really do need better error handling. As it is, this script was thrown together just to get the automation started. And the funny thing is, I had just sat down tonight to fix it up some more.

The point is that there will be no more data until the Chronicle updates theirs.

Let’s hope everything worked as expected.

Also, I finished the automation of the weekly update of sold homes. Lucky thing too, considering I’ll be at Burning Man through the 5^th.

I have exciting news! I passed the real estate sales person exam. I’m through the hard part of getting a real estate license. It’s pretty exciting. Hopefully, I’ll have access to the MLS soon, and before you know it there’ll be more useful data on the website.

As a result of the studying I didn’t make sure the new data got up on Sunday. But it’s up now!

Eventually I will add some images and make it more obvious what I’m talking about.

I think it looks much better and it will include search tips and some words about the purpose of this website.

I’ve been working on this design for a while. It’s definitely been fun, though I have to tell you that sometimes it can be pretty hard to get everything just exactly as you want it. I know my CSS pretty well, but I not the super expert that might be required to solve the minor issues that I couldn’t get to work exactly perfectly. And wouldn’t you know it, but the problems were both non-compliance by IE. When are they going to follow the standards?

Why do they get away with this?

I hope you enjoy the new design. I know I do. I think it looks much better than the almost ugly old version.

Also, I changed the way the searching works. Before, the AJAX call was grabbing the results from a PHP page that would first go and count the number of records that were possible to be returned, and then it would hit the database again to get the actual records that were going to be returned to the front end. So, two queries that weren’t running asynchronous. Now they are two different AJAX calls and it runs faster. I find it interesting that sometimes the count query doesn’t beat the record set results query, and as a result the notation of how many pages could possibly be returned isn’t listed. But usually it is. There's something really interesting to me about the fact that sometimes it doesn’t return first and sometimes it does. I like slight randomness in programming. Alot.

Also, I built the ability to page through the record results. So, instead of just knowing that you’re not seeing all the results for a particular query, now you can actually flip through the pages, if you wanted. I’m curious to see how many people actually will do that.

You did know that I store the queries that people search on? I don’t recall if I posted that before. I haven’t had a chance to look at that data yet. But I’m excited to look at it and see where and what folks are searching on.

Below find the first version of BayAreaSoldHomes. Stored here for posterity’s sake.

Here's the image if you want to look at the full sized one.

http://www.BayAreaSoldHomes.com/images/version1.gif 

It was a little later than usual because we were out camping this weekend at Sonoma Lake. Its pretty fun and you can camp where it's boat in only camping. Though, it doesn't prevent the loud, obnoxious types from camping near you.

Hopefully soon I’ll finish getting the weekly process all automated so it won’t matter where I am on the weekends.

Also, today is Sunday, and as such the homes sold data for the past week has been posted. Data has been updated for the website. You can now search through 7/9/2006 on your quest for information.

When I started this project I didn’t have adequate time to invest in the processes that were creating the data for this project. As a result, there wasn’t the best error handling and some of the other code was lacking.

Well, not anymore. The ‘second pass’ has been completed and with it there’s now 14% more sold properties listed and mapped. How cool is that!

That being said I still have 35,991 properties that I haven’t been able to geocode. Even with Yahoo’s geocoder. The addresses are too new, most likely new developments. It’s possible that there are some with erroneous addresses also.

Today I noticed a referring site that actually had a fair amount of people clicking through and guess what I found?

I've been blogged! How exciting is that?

This is way more fun than I imagined.

You can see that post here: http://g-blog.net/user/dsh/entry/31433