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, 23 January 2009
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 :-)
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:
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 :-)
- 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
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 :-)
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
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 :-)
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 :-)
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
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.
... 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.
Saturday, 29 November 2008
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:
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)
- 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
Sunday, 23 November 2008
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)