studentsay the blog

Today we launched a new prize draw on StudentSay to try and encourage some of the browsers to submit reviews to the site… For every 500 genuine accommodation reviews that the site receives we will give away an ipod - not bad eh? In order to be entered into the draw you simply have to enter your email address on the page following your review, the draw will be random on the day we roll over 500 so get reviewing!

As a side note the individual review pages have received a small refresh today so that they are structured neater and also match the city pages, hopefully this will make things easier to read and also puts any uploaded photos at the top of the review instead of the bottom. Over the coming week each page will get its own little changes - yay!

Studentsay has had a great month, reviews have been coming in every day and pageviews are steadily rising - making the site increasingly useful for you guys to find the right accommodation! We have also been cultivating relationships with several other student websites and magazines, look out for more information on these soon.

I have a huge list of things that will be changing on the site over the summer and we are really excited about the new features we will be adding, stay tuned.

I haven’t posted in a while as unfortunately it is that time of year for a university student. Although i don’t have any exams there is masses of coursework to be done over the next 6 weeks until i finish for good! After that i will make sure the site gets a good spruce up, mainly the review page and getting some dynamic content on the front page like random reviews from the directory.

On another related not i have started county court proceedings against my previous landlord this morning to claim back unpaid bonds. When everything is settled i will make sure to write up my experiences and probably a guide on studentsay for anyone that is considering it..

I have removed the ‘recent searches’ box from the front page due to abuse and url’s being entered a little too often.

It’s unfortunate that i have had to do this but i will try and find something equally useful and dynamic to put on the front page soon!

Made some minor changes and fixed up text around the site today. Also added the ability to enter rent per month as well as per week, this is then calculated to display as weekly rent so that the site remains consistent.

As promised last week, multi word searches are now working far better than before. Searches are now returning on average twice as many relevant results as before because it will no longer look for a very specific phrase. It has taken a lot longer than i predicted to get it working and it is now obvious how important it is!

Hopefully the new review rich search pages will boost pagerank and visitor counts! My next item to hit is improving the review page itself to be more attractive and improve the rates of people finishing reviews…

Just a quick note to say i have fixed an awfull bug i introduced to the search function on Christmas day! It has been causing some words with particular letter patterns to be scrambled and stopping queries returning the correct results..

Sorry all!

It’s christmas time in the studentsay household, the family are all at home - what a perfect time to sit down and add some new features to the website!

This week we have added new pages that show the landlords in our database for each city, to reach them you have to go the city page and click on ‘list all landlords’. I will be making these pages available from elsewhere in the site in the coming week as well.

We have also updated the search functions to better handle common queries and display large amounts of results in a clear fashion. I am hoping to really improve the searching even further over the next month to better handle multi-word queries, which isnt great at the minute.

 Merry Christmas all.

Even though our website is still small and new, we try and stay on top of the latest technologies at studentsay. Yesterday we added microformat support which will become standard in the next generation of browsers (firefox 3) next year.

What does this mean for users? Microformats are the start of the next generation of the internet, allowing computers to understand data as easily as humans. For example, your browser will understand that you are reading a review and what it is about - it can then offer you relevant things to do with it like, share, save or search for similair reviews on other websites. Your browser will also understand the address of the property and be able to link you straight to the accommodation in mapping software of your choice.

Studentsay currently supports the adr, hCard and hReview standards and we will add more as they become mainstream.

Lots has been happening behind the scenes at studentsay for the past couple of weeks. We have been preparing advertising for a new student magazine and making lots of useful tweaks throughout the website including:

• Top landlords / cities page revamped to show how many reviews decide the rating
• Every rating on studentsay now shows an exact number when you mouse over
• New report page for notifying us of inappropriate reviews
• New spam catching system to stop the endless stream of bots uploading viagra adverts!

A few more changes coming within the week including the ability to search by postcode from the advanced search page (you can already do this using the search bar in the top right) and an improved review page.