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 :-)

Clocked? Or just can't enter more than 5 digits?

As a way of helping me improve the site I keep a record of searches which I sometimes review to help me check correct data is being returned. I've noticed a few odd things recently which lead me to wonder what on earth is going on with MOT results. I might see a few years of steady increases, only for clock not to turn around at the 100,000 mile mark and seemingly revert back to zero. At first I thought I was having a bad run of seeing clocked vehicles, but thought it would be odd for it not to raise suspicion at VOSA for anyone to have MOT mileage lower than their previous test. And now it appears its happening to pretty much every vehicle in the last few years (some are over 100,000 - but not recent tests). I'm now almost convinced that VOSA's system is only allowing test centres to enter 5 digits.

I'm now tempted to try and figure out a way of guessing if this has happened. If the mileage suddenly goes down I can add 100,000 back onto it to try and correct for the problem. It seems like a reasonable way as long as I display a warning to say the mileage might be off. In any case I really need to do something, since this is breaking the mileage estimates and graphs.

On a side note I need to set a minimum range for the estimates to work over - if your last two tests were in the order fail then pass its likely the range will only be over a day or so with no mileage and break the current mileage estimator. Should be a relatively easy fix. Oh - and the maps have gone live in beta on the main site. Have fun :-)

In The Lab

You know, I keep on coming up with all sorts of wierd and wonderful stuff to add to Free Car Check. One thing I thought which could be interesting is knowing where around the country your car has been in its life. Free Car Check can already pull your MOT results so this is pretty easy...

... until you come to actually turning those results into locations. I've been playing with the Google Maps API and managed to get it working over the weekend. It's currently only available on the development site but it should make a reasonably cool addition.

I've also been playing around with VIN numbers. Theres a fair amount of data you can get from these if you know how to read them. Since I'm getting a large number of international visitors and it'd be another useful addition to have I've started on my own decoder. So far I've got continent and country nailed down, but really need a comprehensive list of WMI numbers (which represent manufacturers) to get myself off the ground. I've found a few sources so I'll have to see how it goes.

Downtime & New Things

Free Car Check had some problems later yesterday and earlier today with DNS which prevented it from contacting data providers. As a result FCC was unable to provide any reports and also kept timing out. If you were trying to get a check during those times and had problems you should be able to try again now. There were also some problems retrieving data about MOT failures due to what seems to be a modification of the MOTINFO site. I've put a quick fix in for it, though MOT expiry dates are now unavailable. I need to put together a better regex for it (I also want to get advisory notices).

On the plus side I've made some progress on getting the site itself into a more manageable state and I've been working on some highly exciting legal bits. I had previously submitted Free Car Check to the people at MoneySavingExpert only to have it rejected for not having a privacy policy. So there's one up at the development site now.

I'm still looking for more useful addons to the site. I'm looking right now at:

• Registration Number Decoders (year of registration, DVLA office involved etc)
• VIN Decoders (make, model, year of manufacture, unique serial etc)

On some slightly more fun additions, I'm thinking:

• Maps of test stations - find out where a vehicle has been tested
• More environmental data - see the number of trees needed to offset the mileage of a car

Work towards being able to register has now started, so that'll be the next big project for the time. If you've got any opinions of what should be added next feel free to add a comment here.

And They're Done

Well, almost!

I've just got them working on the development site which I use to test out changes before I make them available to everyone (which stops me looking silly when I miss out a semicolon or something similarly idiotic...).

Take a look:


The graphs are made using the Google Charts API. Its not particularly pretty, but seems easier and more reliable than other chart solutions I've seen.

Mileage Graphs

Now full MOT results are available I have the ability to sort out mileage graphs. I'm looking to present them in a few formats:

• Line graph - showing current mileage over time
• Variable width bar chart - showing average mileage per month over time
• Yearly bar chart - showing estimated yearly mileage

I can also estimate the current mileage based upon the average daily mileage in the last MOT period. Based on my own mileage this method came out pretty good.

The code to get together data for these statistics is already done - so all I need to do is get the graphs to be generated. I've been looking at Google Chart API and Open Flash Chart. Google's offering is pretty easy to use but seems a bit odd in that its bad at figuring out how to scale bar charts. OFC on the other hand seems a bit more powerful (you can add your own shapes to charts and do some other nice things) but code wise its a bit of a pain. I'm playing with both to see which one I like more. Hopefully I can get something working soon in beta.

MOT Testing & Going Green

Last week I said I'd got together all the environment data from the VCA and done some work to make it easily searchable. It's now available to view - enter the registration number and Free Car Check will go off and look for the nearest matching vehicles. There are still some teething troubles and older vehicles probably won't come up with results since VCA data doens't go back that far.

In other improvements you can now display all previous electronic MOT records. Information available includes the data, mileage, result and the test station. It doesn't yet show any advisories issued - I need a better way of displaying them than in a table. Added to the todo list :-)

Environmental Data

Today I completed gathering the data for environment checks from the VCA and the beta is looking pretty good. I'll be rolling it out to the main site soon. Also on my wish list now:

• Home Office Vehicle Crime Statistics - http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/policingroads.html
  
• Insurance Group Lookup (Thatcham) - http://www.thatcham.org/abigrouprating/index.jsp?page=343
  
• Vehicle Recalls (VOSA) - http://www.vosa.gov.uk/vosa/apps/recalls/default.asp
  

Welcome

I've been adding a lot of new useful things to Free Car Check for a while now, but I've not really had a good way of keeping you all up to date with it. So welcome to the new Free Car Check blog!

There's currently lots on the todo list:

• Environmental data
• Proper stolen police reports
• Insurance checks (for owners only mind)
• Mileage graphs
• Estimate current mileage
  
• Results from MOT test numbers
• Ability to store MOT number/document reference number with permission
• MOT/vehicle tax/insurance reminders
• Upload images of cars (for fun!)

What would you like to see first?