Thursday, January 15, 2004
WooHoo! Bought a new house this morning, we saw it on Tuesday (only the 3rd one we looked at), and went back this morning to see it in daylight, then made the offer, and it's been accepted. Now we just have to see if we can get a mortgage, we've got a financial advisor coming round tonight, and he's going to advise us. Altogether thinks are going too badly (touch wood) with our financial affairs. We have credit cards (thanks to our friendly neighbourhood bank manager), and it turns out we haven't needed the loan yet, as we're happy(ish) with our cheap and nasty cars, the year's insurance was higher than the cost of either car.
My next task is to find myself some life assurance, as we're not going to go for an endowment mortgage again, this might be tough being 40, overweight, with high blood pressure and a history of heart disease in my family. Maybe this is the time to go on a crash diet, the last few goodies left over from Christmas are dwindling now, and the new house has got tons more room, including 3 cellars, so I could set one up as a home gym, and finally start using my rowing machine.
When I've tried using it in the living room, both children inevitably want to come and climb on and play boats, which doesn't help.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
My next task is to find myself some life assurance, as we're not going to go for an endowment mortgage again, this might be tough being 40, overweight, with high blood pressure and a history of heart disease in my family. Maybe this is the time to go on a crash diet, the last few goodies left over from Christmas are dwindling now, and the new house has got tons more room, including 3 cellars, so I could set one up as a home gym, and finally start using my rowing machine.
When I've tried using it in the living room, both children inevitably want to come and climb on and play boats, which doesn't help.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Well, it's growing, we now have 55 sites using the DMOZ database and therefore showing links to Moneysupermarket. Though it turns out that we missed out on the last import of the DMOZ database by Google in November.
My own quest to become number 1 for the search term "Chris Smith" seems to be going nowhere fast. I'm not even in the top 100 as far as I can tell, and it's so boring trawling through the pages to find where you are. I blame 'the gay MP' Chris Smith. He might as well change his name to 'Gay Chris Smith', even if he retires from politics, he'll always be 'gay ex-MP', or perhaps he'll make it to the top and be 'gay PM Chris Smith'. Of course, then I'll have no chance of being ranked highly at Google.
If you do put a link out to this site, then please make it's got the words 'Chris Smith' in the URL somewhere. You can use the name as the linked text, or put it into a TITLE attribute of the <A tag>.
As I'm suffering from more back trouble after a relatively long pain-free period, I'm going to enrol in a Pilates class tonight, though I'm not sure how swashbuckling is going to help. Which reminds me - finally, my all time favourite piece of radio has emerged as (appropriately enough) an MP3. Radio 4 makes me feel proud to be British, and there's not much else that does.
Here it be, me hearties, a tale of pirates bold who sails the Spanish Main armed only with swords and a SWOT analysis, aarrr!
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
My own quest to become number 1 for the search term "Chris Smith" seems to be going nowhere fast. I'm not even in the top 100 as far as I can tell, and it's so boring trawling through the pages to find where you are. I blame 'the gay MP' Chris Smith. He might as well change his name to 'Gay Chris Smith', even if he retires from politics, he'll always be 'gay ex-MP', or perhaps he'll make it to the top and be 'gay PM Chris Smith'. Of course, then I'll have no chance of being ranked highly at Google.
If you do put a link out to this site, then please make it's got the words 'Chris Smith' in the URL somewhere. You can use the name as the linked text, or put it into a TITLE attribute of the <A tag>.
As I'm suffering from more back trouble after a relatively long pain-free period, I'm going to enrol in a Pilates class tonight, though I'm not sure how swashbuckling is going to help. Which reminds me - finally, my all time favourite piece of radio has emerged as (appropriately enough) an MP3. Radio 4 makes me feel proud to be British, and there's not much else that does.
Here it be, me hearties, a tale of pirates bold who sails the Spanish Main armed only with swords and a SWOT analysis, aarrr!
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
Monday, January 05, 2004
Well, the move went as well as expected, i.e. I spent days incapacitated because of my back. Next time we're paying for proper removal men.
We're finally free of all that Dutch stuff now, at least I hope so, but knowing Dutch bureaucracy, I'm not entirely convinced. At least though, in Holland, they have a decent website for finding a house. Here in the UK, it's appalling, there are a couple of big websites but they're both crap. More at the BBC website.
Estate agents don't seem to have taken to the web at all, which is surprising. In my long career on the internet (8 or 9 years now), I remember various conferences where speakers would tell us about the future of the WWW. Usually house buying would come up as an example. We were told that when buying a house you'd simply tell your intelligent agent what you wanted, and it would trawl the web for you and provide you with not only photos, but videos, maps to your place of work and/or school for children, the crime rate, the occupations of your potential neighbours.... All this on your web enabled fridge.
I got quite overwhelmed with all this stuff. I used to kid people telling them about a project I heard about which was the web-enabled toilet which would analyse your 'output' and contact either your virtual doctor if it found a serious problem, or your supermarket to adjust your diet if it found you weren't eating enough fibre. It would also connect to your personal agent which would nag you about eating more fruit, or drinking more water.
Most people believed me, and I'm sure that before 9/11, someone was actually working on such a device.
Anyway, I did expect that the web would have enabled me to find a house efficiently by 2004. Instead, it seems most estate agents still want to send you their entire listings by post whatever you want.
No single estate agent is going to produce a useful site, no-one cares which agent they use when buying a house, it's the house that matters. I don't want to trawl around 20 different sites each week to check them.
All I want is one single database of all the houses, with sufficient detail in the database so I can sort them by a couple of criteria such as number of bedrooms, price and area (and by the way you arrogant London nazis - 'The North' is not a sufficiently small area for a meaningful selection).
Before I came back from Holland in June I went to a meeting of newspaper websites where the above mentioned Dutch site - www.funda.nl, which is owned and run by the association of Dutch estate agents - gave a presentation. The gist of this was - every single house placed with an estate agent in Holland is on our site, so we don't need newspapers anymore - Byee. Not advertising in newspapers would save them thousands of pounds of course, so it would also make sense for the newspapers to launch such a site before the estate agents get together and do it. Meanwhile the buggers insist on phoning me! What is this, the 80s?
Anyway, enough ranting. My SEO work continues, and after finally getting my employer's site Moneysupermarket into DMOZ, it's fun to see that it's finally propagating around the web as people download the DMOZ database. They don't do this very often though a new version is available each week, mind you it's a humungous size. I downloaded it once, and because it's not actually a database, but a weird type of XML, you have to have specialist programs to parse it into something useful, so I'm not surprised.
Today there were 54 sites who were using the copy of the db that we're in, I'm intrigued to see how this will grow.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
We're finally free of all that Dutch stuff now, at least I hope so, but knowing Dutch bureaucracy, I'm not entirely convinced. At least though, in Holland, they have a decent website for finding a house. Here in the UK, it's appalling, there are a couple of big websites but they're both crap. More at the BBC website.
Estate agents don't seem to have taken to the web at all, which is surprising. In my long career on the internet (8 or 9 years now), I remember various conferences where speakers would tell us about the future of the WWW. Usually house buying would come up as an example. We were told that when buying a house you'd simply tell your intelligent agent what you wanted, and it would trawl the web for you and provide you with not only photos, but videos, maps to your place of work and/or school for children, the crime rate, the occupations of your potential neighbours.... All this on your web enabled fridge.
I got quite overwhelmed with all this stuff. I used to kid people telling them about a project I heard about which was the web-enabled toilet which would analyse your 'output' and contact either your virtual doctor if it found a serious problem, or your supermarket to adjust your diet if it found you weren't eating enough fibre. It would also connect to your personal agent which would nag you about eating more fruit, or drinking more water.
Most people believed me, and I'm sure that before 9/11, someone was actually working on such a device.
Anyway, I did expect that the web would have enabled me to find a house efficiently by 2004. Instead, it seems most estate agents still want to send you their entire listings by post whatever you want.
No single estate agent is going to produce a useful site, no-one cares which agent they use when buying a house, it's the house that matters. I don't want to trawl around 20 different sites each week to check them.
All I want is one single database of all the houses, with sufficient detail in the database so I can sort them by a couple of criteria such as number of bedrooms, price and area (and by the way you arrogant London nazis - 'The North' is not a sufficiently small area for a meaningful selection).
Before I came back from Holland in June I went to a meeting of newspaper websites where the above mentioned Dutch site - www.funda.nl, which is owned and run by the association of Dutch estate agents - gave a presentation. The gist of this was - every single house placed with an estate agent in Holland is on our site, so we don't need newspapers anymore - Byee. Not advertising in newspapers would save them thousands of pounds of course, so it would also make sense for the newspapers to launch such a site before the estate agents get together and do it. Meanwhile the buggers insist on phoning me! What is this, the 80s?
Anyway, enough ranting. My SEO work continues, and after finally getting my employer's site Moneysupermarket into DMOZ, it's fun to see that it's finally propagating around the web as people download the DMOZ database. They don't do this very often though a new version is available each week, mind you it's a humungous size. I downloaded it once, and because it's not actually a database, but a weird type of XML, you have to have specialist programs to parse it into something useful, so I'm not surprised.
Today there were 54 sites who were using the copy of the db that we're in, I'm intrigued to see how this will grow.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
