Sunday 26 April 2009

Stolen Vehicles - The Saga Continues

Ever wanted to know if a car is reported stolen? Free Car Check has its own stolen vehicle reports (although its not been used much), but what I've really always wanted to do is get access to the reports that the Police make available to the other vehicle checking companies. The problem has always been how on earth to even start on the road to getting that information.

Last year I used the Freedom of Information Act to request a listing of which organisations have access to the stolen vehicles list and who is responsible for allowing access (On a side note FOI requests are great - it's really liberating to be able to poke about in government!). It's taken me a while to sort out responding to it, but I now have the form I need to request access. And given a bit of luck when the people in the Police come together for their next access meeting on the 2nd July I'll be one step further to providing access to the reports for free!

Friday 3 April 2009

Squashing Bugs

I've been fixing a few problems going on recently. Things like the font size being different between Internet Explorer and Firefox. We've also added a new "Select Manufacturer" screen which we display if we have problems figuring out the make of your vehicle.

I've also put a new feature into beta - Quick Valuations. By checking Google Base we can look for similar cars for sale and give you the average price and mileage. It's very rough right now, but with more data from other sources it should get useably accurate.

Sunday 15 March 2009

Accounts & Tweaks

Time for a quick update...

The new accounts system has gone live, and whilst quite a few of you have signed up very few have entered car details. You can now login straight after registration with your own password instead of waiting for a verification email. Come on, give it a try! :-)

I've seen your comments on User Voice - we'll try and get round to saved searches soon!

Wednesday 18 February 2009

Free Car Check v2 is live!

The new version of the site is up with the accounts system. Get your car registered now! Oh - and leave some feedback here:

http://freecarcheck.uservoice.com/

Cheers!

Friday 23 January 2009

Free Car Check V2 Update

If you've been spying on the development site at http://dev.freecarcheck.org/ you might have seen the new accounts system - I covered it in my last blog post here a few weeks ago. I spent some more time on it, and its working pretty nice now.

I've also got some other changes - FCC will also be (hopefully temporarily) requiring you to enter the manufacturer. I'm looking to team up with an insurer who can provide that information for me, but I also don't want to start showing ads which is leaving me in a bit of a dilemma!

I've also added a CAPTCHA since I had someone from a car prices website flood the FCC server with requests. Even worse I think they were selling the reports. I won't mention the company here for fear of slander, but they seem to have the questionable business practice of asking for contact details without making clear you'll be sent a bill in the post for their service. So if you do want a car valuation make you sure you read the companies terms and conditions!

Friday 2 January 2009

Happy New Year

About time I updated the blog post with whats been going on. I wound down for the holidays, but been doing a few bits and bobs in the meantime. The new Free Car Check now has registration working, and I have a user page populated with a "My Vehicles" overview - at a glance you check if your families cars are all taxed and MOT'd.


If you really want you can already create an account - but since only I can add vehicles I'd say there's not much point yet :-)

Friday 19 December 2008

New Toys

This week has seen me playing with lots of different things on Free Car Check:
  • Create an OpenSearch plugin to allow searches from within Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer
  • Statistics on the development site - see what manufacturers and colours people are finding
  • Start of the accounts system for advanced functionality I want to add
As a little treat heres the development site:

http://dev.freecarcheck.org/

A lot of the time this can get ugly and break - so don't get too worried if its fallen over. Use it at your own risk :-)