good news, after a summer hiatus #Geomob is back with an event on the 19th of November at UCL. I’ll be seizing the opportunity to speak about Mapstraction, an open source javascript library we use on Nestoria.

Long time readers will recall that we sponsored the original development of Mapstraction over three years ago. We and many other websites have been reaping the benefits ever since. Recently a new version of Mapstraction (mxn v2) was developed to be faster, lighter, cleaner, and more easily extendable. We made the switch a few months ago with great results. I’ll be discussing the details of why to use Mapstraction generally and the benefits of v2 specifically. Many thanks to all the developers who have contributed over the years. Every Nestoria user benefits.

We look forward to seeing you at #Geomob!

Nowadays DST is popularly regarded as a disrupting legacy practice of little benefit. Every six months we all have to adjust our behaviour, which of course is reflected in seasonal peaks of interest in DST:

We had the suspicion that many of the UK residents spent that additional time to sleep one hour more on a particularly lazy Sunday morning.

Back at the office, we were curious enough to check the impact of the time change on our metrics. We are always trying to improve how Nestoria users make the most of the property search engine. We measure that by looking at, among many other parameters, the number of visitors, their time on site and what they exactly do, particularly clicking on navigational features, property listings, pictures of houses, etc.

Impact of DST on the last Sunday in October 2009 on Nestoria.co.uk

We compared the activity on the Sunday 25th October, when clocks were adjusted one hour backward, with the previous Sunday, October 18th with the standard duration of 24 hours. The duration of the day was adjusted to identical periods of 24 hours and the number of visits normalized for the two days of comparison.

The distribution of the visitors in percentage of the total daily hardly varies beyond 7% on the total daily average, measured as the differences in the sum of percentages of visits of the visitors. Sundays are usually the days of the week with the longest average time on site, followed by Saturdays.

We found that Daylight Saving does show a significant shift in the hourly pattern of usage of the web site: up to 10% of users shifted the beginning and end of their visits during the beginning and the end of the day. Whilst the total variation is small in numbers, the shift of activity shows the expected behaviour of visits that start earlier in the day and start to decline also earlier.

No evidence that one additional hour of duration of the day generated proportionally more visits

The additional hour of the last Sunday in October increased by 4% (from 24 hours to 25 hours) the real duration of that day. The number of visits increased by 4%. It is unclear whether this variation in total number of visitors is due to weekly seasonality and/or increased duration of the day. It seems that additional availability of time is not spent in more activity online. That extra hour that day could dedicated to rest or leisure.

You may find a complete description of the analysis at Archive.org

As we tweeted yesterday, we’re expanding Nestoria to new territories, specifically Australia. We need help. Please join us if you’re up for the challenge (and qualified).

Not findable on Nestoria. Yet.

(photo thanks to andy_tyler)

I’m pleased to announce that we are now working together with leading classifieds site Gumtree. Property searchers can now find Gumtree listings on Nestoria. Here’s the requisite screenshot:

A big welcome to our new partner as we celebrate another small step on the path to making it as easy as possible to find your next home. Enjoy!

here at Nestoria we pride ourselves on a rigorous adherence to “just in time” production methods. As such it was appropriate that our team Summer event took place on almost the final official day of summer a few weeks ago.

With speculation rife over the last year about the collapse of the global economy – lead by a fall in house prices in the UK and Spain (two of our biggest markets) – we thought it appropriate to focus on honing skills that will help us succeed in a post-apocalyptic world. As such we headed out of the old office and into the wild to do a bit of team building via wilderness skills training.

For all of our fans out there here are some pics of the Lokku team in action:

Firestarting contest – no matches

A chance for reflection on the challenges ahead.

Doing our part to solve the UK housing shortage

The weather gods smiled upon us and a good time was had by all. Most importantly we’re well positioned for the future.

In seriousness, we’ve had a great year so far despite the bumps in the road thrown up by the global financial meltdown. A big thanks to the team for their hard work and to all of our partners for their support. We look forward to great things ahead.

BTW – if this looks like the kind of backwoods internet fun that you’d be interested in being a part of please get in touch as we’re hiring.

as we hinted in our recent Nestoria interview with Mark Keating, we’re going to be sponsoring the London Perl Workshop for the fourth year in a row. This year’s LPW will be on Saturday, December 5th at Westminster University’s New Cavendish Campus.

If past experience is any guide, the day will be a great mix of interesting technical talks ranging from the introductory to the advanced. Hopefully a few members of the Nestoria team will be on the speaker roster as in years past (please let us know if there are any topics you’d particularly like us to cover.

We’ve benefited greatly from the support of the global perl community, and and thankful for the chance to once again participate as a sponsor. We’re also keen to do our part to raise the general level of the event. Specifically we’ll be building on the tradition started last year and awarding prizes based on attendee voting/mob rule in the following categories:

• Best overall talk
• Best topic
• Best lightening talk
• Best new CPAN module of the past year

What the prizes will be exactly remains to be decided, but rest assured winners will be the envy of their perl hacking peers. So get to work on your talk!

Many thanks to the organisers and the other sponsors, and most of all to London’s great perl community. We look forward to seeing everyone there.

As in past years Nestoria is very proud to be a sponsor of the London Perl Workshop and we invite any one with an interest in open source software to come along. More details about that in an upcoming post.

Mark, thanks for making the time to tell us about LPW.

1. Why does London in particular have such an active perl community? What’s the essential ingredient in maintaining an active open source community?

There are a combination of factors that make up London’s strong Perl community. The first to my mind is the steadfast support of its more senior, and I am not going to say mature, members who have been active in promoting the group. London held one of the very first YAPCs and the first YAPC::EU and has always encouraged strong involvement from its members in the wider community.

Another contributing factor is the manner of the social meetings, they always try to make newcomers feel welcome, will organise emergency socials at the drop of a hat for visitors to London and strive to make the socials as non-Perl specific as possible. No matter what your background you feel included by these people.Then there is the mailing list. At some times trivial, always busy and with great historical events such as the Willow vs Buffy trauma, the LPM mailing list is perhaps the most subscribed to list of any monger group and with good reason.

These to me are a basis for the essential, and sometimes elusive, ingredients of maintaining a community. There is no silver bullet or single approach, it is a combination of factors and the inclusiveness, support and notion that one is working amongst equals (though I always feel surrounded by giants) is a strong factor in this.

2. The last few years have seen a renaissance in the perl community, with great new modules, an emphasis on testing and “enlightened” development techniques, more conferences, and a more vocal community (big thanks to blogs like perlbuzz). What’s responsible for this?

Still going for the easy questions . That is a very complex situation to assess as there are many factors affecting the Renaissance/Enlightenment/Modern Perl that we have today. On a side note my personal preference to that is that Perl is in an Enlightenment that is the motion towards what we can know as Modern Perl, the Renaissance, for me, came and went around Perl 5.8.

The changes started a good deal of time ago. I think the dawning of the current movement happened around the time between Perl 5.6 to 5.8, or at least that’s when the effects could be seen. Since that point there has been a maturity of projects and the developers both in their approach and output. At the same time there has been changes in the language itself, projects such as Moose, Catalyst, Dbix::Class and Devel::Declare to name a few, who seek to utilise, and in some cases form, the language changes that have been under continuous development in Perl. We should value the importance of CPAN and its breadth of resources that have allowed Perl development, projects and libraries to start with a strong foundation.

As for the vocal community, I think we are finally coming to realise that we know how good the language and its associated tools are, but it often feels that the rest of the world is under some impression that we are just gluing things together with CGI scripts. So I think there is a common feeling that we must firstly discuss the current state of Perl and secondly educate people away from ‘legacy’ techniques bringing them up to date with the current best practices.

3. This year LPW’s theme is “Beginning Perl”. Who is the target audience? What types of talks can attendees expect? Why are universities in the UK typically not teaching perl, despite the high level of demand from companies?

As always the LPW seeks to bring new people through the doors, and these can be Perl developers with years of experience ‘under the belt’ as well as welcoming back old friends and stalwart community giants. The theme is broad and is intended to give the speakers and audience a chance to explore the notion of beginnings. This could be starting Perl for the first time, or a ‘How To’ for people not familiar with the language or a project, it can also be taken as a chance to present how something began, such as a piece of development. One could even go further and look at the great advances in Strawberry Perl, Raduko, Padre and see this as Beginning Perl and Perl 6 on Windows. But at the same time the current movement in Perl, the feeling that in Perl since 5.8 we have been passing versions instead of point releases, so that we currently stand at Perl 5 Version 10.1 and the changes in the projects and the core itself seem to reflect that. So Beginning Perl could be seen as truly that for all of us. I am hoping that a lot of people will come to the event and decide to begin something new in Perl.

There is a culture in UK Universities to teach Java in computer science degrees and this is going to be difficult to change without a level of investment and commitment. There is also the fact that there have been non-educational forces on the universities as well, on a business sense it is wise for them to push .net and Java to their students as it gives them a broader job market when they leave university which satisfies a governmental focus. Part of our task should be to educate universities as much as possible to the job market for Perl skills. At this year’s LPW we will be running a free ‘Skills in the Workplace’ seminar that will be initially offered to University students to help towards this issue.

4. As someone who started a business working with open source software, please describe your experiences. How has the level of acceptance of open source changed in the business community in the past few years?

The movement towards open source becoming accepted has been slow, and in many cases quite tortuous. In the last few years though we have seen a big push inside some Governments for open standards and open document formats for the sharing of information and resources, particularly in the European Union, and OSS already works towards this. For most Small to Medium Enterprises though, there is a great deal of struggle to convince them that the software pre-installed is the best way forward, especially since their staff will have a great deal of experience in using it and this to them outweighs the cost of ownership versus OSS solutions. Where we have come forward has been in the acceptance of projects such as Firefox and the general awareness of the populace that many servers use Open Source to function. The pushes by Google to open source Android has given businesses faith in the idea that a business model can be built on OSS.

The transparency of Open Source, the ease of availability and the fact that we are a far more computer-orientated culture has also helped to strengthen acceptance of the possibilities of using it as an alternative. There is still a long way to go though.

It has certainly helped that open source is reported and discussed in the general media, at one time we would spend the first hour or so of any meeting explaining what open source software was in comparison to proprietary/closed software, we no longer have to say as much. I still feel that there is a culture of treating it as a ‘ham radio’ or academic-orientated which is an uphill struggle.

There are even deeper changes caused by the flow and availability of data, expertise, as to whether businesses can now rely on a closed-model of business focus if it seems to stymie innovation, and if using a proprietary route will mire you in the circumlocution of patents, intellectual property, copyright and trademarks but I think they are out of the scope of this answer.

Certainly if we examine the last twenty years there has been a broader uptake of Open Source in the last five years, how much this has been influenced by the stronger computer-orientated culture is interesting. I hope that the future we will see more companies realising that OSS represents a real choice to a formerly dominant closed software system.

Thanks Mark, and also big thanks to you and everyone else in the global perland open source community. Nestoria would not be possible without all of your work. As a result we’re very pleased to once again support this year’s LPW. Last year’s event was great and I have no doubt this year’s will be better.

On a related note, we’re always on the lookout for talented people looking to get started in perl. Please contact us if interested, or say hello at the LPW.

past Nestoria interviews: Jason Trost, Christopher Parker, and Ryan Notz.

We are pleased to announce that Nestoria is going to be one of the sponsors of BarCamp London 7 that is taking place 24th-25th October 2009 at IBM/Southbank. The first round of tickets is already gone but there are two more to come. The next stage is a lottery that is taking place between midday on the 30th September and midday on Saturday the 3rd of October.

First time attendees have a 50% higher chance of getting a ticket. So if you’ve never been to a BarCamp do check it out, it’s a chance to hang out with fellow geeks and exchange experiences. If you want to be up to date about the ticket rounds follow @barcamplondon on Twitter, tickets usually go very fast and not nearly everyone who would like one gets one.
We look forward to meeting you there and telling you about our latest adventures such as Where Can I Live, a project of our experimental platform Lokku Labs !

just a quick post to announce that we just went live with v1.16 of the Nestoria API. We had some feedback from a user asking why we didn’t allow filtering by number of bathrooms. Lame! So now we’ve added it. Apologies for the oversight. Enjoy.

As always, full technical docs and release notes can be found here. Thanks for your feedback.

Good news, from this week you can find the listings of Scotland based lettings portal Citylets on Nestoria. Citylets has a great portfolio of lettings agents and their properties across Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, the rest of Scotland and Belfast in Northern Ireland.

This is another small step for us on making your search for a new place to live even simpler. Big thanks to our new partner, and happy house hunting!