Adzooks.co.uk Blog: November 2005 Archives

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November 29, 2005

Locations and Profiles – webbing the link

You may have noticed a couple of recent additions to the sites: user profiles and locations pages (the latter live on the London, North Wales and Teesside sites, coming soon to the others). These emphasise the community aspect of each area and allow new ways of linking ads together, creating exciting new ways of searching the site.

User profiles give you the chance to have your own page on the site, with a little information about yourself and a list of all your ads. Your profile will have a link on all of your ads and through these links it will be easier to get people to see all of your ads, and so works best the more ads you have.

The location pages enable you to find all ads in and around a specific area. For example, in London you can search for all ads in any part of North London (http://london.adzooks.co.uk/location/north-london), say Enfield, and immediately see all ads related to that area (http://london.adzooks.co.uk/location/north-london/enfield/). This works by postcodes – you put your postcode in when you post an ad and Adzooks files it in the relevant area. So for whichever Adzooks area you live in, you can find everything that’s going on in that area.

The information supplied (postcodes and your profile) are used to make these links work. If you are the nervous type, only worry if we start asking you for a few hairs and a one of your rear molars (though the request for nail clippings is perfectly fine – it’s just my hobby, nothing to be alarmed about). Locations and profiles have been designed to help you sort through the ads, find what you want and maybe come across something you otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

November 28, 2005

Strictly come dancing to the shops

Evidently in the process of a complete personal transformation, I have found that I really enjoy the typos that appear in Adzooks ads. In Rhyl recently there was a dusky punk three piece suite for sale, next to an ad for a 6” snooker table (I wonder if the seller has ever seen This Is Spinal Tap?). Over on Teesside Adzooks was an ad for a flat that was a 5 min walt to buses and shops. Surely a 5 minute walk, for the no-nonsense and earnest among us. But maybe it was really meant that 5 minute Walts are off to the shops, heigh ho. Personally, I like to think the writer of the ad meant that it was a 5 minute waltz to the buses and shops. I rather like the image of people spinning around in a Viennese waltz as they go about their daily business, gracefully gliding through the streets and industrial estates of Teesside. After serious thought though, I guess it must make stairs quite tricky. Maybe a foxtrot would be more practical. Either way, now I find myself hoping there’ll be typos, even if I do change them back to the sensible. Too bad usability comes first.

November 22, 2005

Rent an ad

Last Easter a stray cat strolled into the house where I live and decided to stay. The cat, named Wanda after how she found us, is ok though getting a bit old and smelly. She’s completely house-trained and does like to sit on people’s lap, whatever they are doing: reading the paper, eating dinner, standing up. Also, once seated she has started to makes smells, really quite potent smells. She also loves to sleep on my bed, especially just after she has been running around outside in the mud – and the evil ogre who also lives in the house loves to let her in my bedroom. The best thing about the house where I live, and the reason I continue to live there, is the rent: brilliantly low even considering the amount I need to use the washing machine (call me squeamish but I don’t much like the earthy feel of grit and mud on my bed linen).

However, having reached a certain point on the relentless trudge through adulthood, I need to be thinking about moving again, regardless of the rent and not only because of the cat. So I scour the accommodation ads as they come onto Adzooks and in doing so I have noticed that the rather high London rent prices have gone astronomical. Fortunately for me and many others, the ads in question mistakenly say ‘per week’ instead of ‘per month’.

When posting an accommodation ad there is a box to enter the rent. Next to it is another box with how often the rent is to be paid. This second box has a choice of two fillers: per week and per month. Currently ‘per week’ is automatically selected, though there is an arrow by the side indicating choices. The number of ads coming through offering a room in the suburbs for £500 per week indicate that the Arrow of Choices has gone largely unnoticed. Though I’m around to fix such mistakes, it is probably better if posters of accommodation ads select the rent collection period they want, rather than run the risk of alarming potential lodgers.

November 16, 2005

I was a work from home millionaire

Soon after Adzooks went live a few ads offering the opportunity to work from home were posted on the sites. The ads generally followed the same rules: offering you the chance to earn lots of cash from the comfort of your own home, you choosing your own hours, though the ads rarely say what the work is. All you have to do is send the poster of the ad £10 to get you started.

Some of the ads are very brief, asking you to email back for more information (then they’ll send you a long sales pitch), and others are very long though equally lacking in any information. In the name of research I replied to one of the more sensible looking ads (now long gone from the site), and sure enough in amongst the bumph I got back was a request for some money.

This is what it comes down to and why these scam ads are placed. There is no real job, and no legitimate offer will ask you for money first to start you off. As a general rule I’ve been taking down any work from home scam ads. Let us know about any scam ads you see by clicking the 'not allowed' button, and I'll investigate and remove them from the site as appropriate.

For more information see our http://london.adzooks.co.uk/scam.shtml page or visit UK Trading Standards at www.tradingstandards.gov.uk and sites such as www.fraud.org for more information about the types of fraud that take place.

November 14, 2005

Jim's computer empire

As adzooks grows and improves, so does my role, though alas not my computer. Sometimes people get attached to heaps of junk that they’ve had for an extended period of time, but not me and my old eyeball melter. We work together discordantly, especially in the afternoon as the computer keeps Continental times, and so likes to sleep after lunch. Taunting me on the desk next to the computer is a big, shiny, ultra-flash iMac. Not wanting to sing its praises as I’ve never used the thing, I can at least say that it certainly doesn’t seem to upset its user, Jim the Designer, who is the calmest person I have ever met.

However, recently I been noticing how the desk opposite me seems to be empty – not because Jim’s skiving off work, but because he seems to have claimed other computers around the office to work on. As he flits from one computer to the next, I have failed to notice till now just how many he seems to use. I’m beginning to wonder whether his chilled-out demeanour is just a façade to mask his growing control of the office, through his own computer network.

Otherwise you may wonder why he uses so many different computers. Rather like how I wonder why some people post the same ad repeatedly. I guess that if you search for, say, sports equipment for sale, and see the same ad for a treadmill over and over again, that is more likely to stick in your memory than a similar thing in a one-off ad. Though the number of times the ad is posted doesn’t affect what is in the ad, it does increase its visibility. However, if everyone were to take this approach, the site would be full of trillions of copies of the same ads, and therefore not be hugely user-friendly.

So while I remove duplicate copies of the same ad and de-clutter the site, I’ll be very suspicious every time Jim asks to use my computer to ‘check something’. It’s disobedient enough as it is without being part of his sinister empire.

November 4, 2005

A change of heart

As strenuous activities go, typing must be pretty low down on the list. It’s not particularly dangerous either: RSI is about the worst it gets, which though very unpleasant, hardly compares to being a bomb disposer or a bodyguard to an American president. Yet people seem very reluctant to complete words when writing ads: vowels especially seem to be regarded as the most calorific. Though the abbreviations are usually fairly std, it can get q diff 2 rd a hole add of them, esp when their r spllng m*takes aswel. So usualy I fil mssng lttrs.

Recently, however, I’ve started to appreciate abbreviations a bit more. Nothing to do with me generally relaxing a bit, perish the thought, but due to an accommodation ad posted on the Liverpool site. It included the std abbr info, inc. specifying that the room to let was only for proffs or studs. Usually I would automatically change that to professionals or students, but in this case I thought I might leave it. Accommodation specifically for studs seemed to fit nicely next to ads searching for someone to have an affair with and selling Bollywood ‘romance’ films set in the Taj Mahal. So maybe I'll change my ways and steady myself with the moderating, take a deep breath and maybe take a break, perhaps even get a life. Perhaps.

However, it might be useful to mention that there isn't a word limit on ads - they can be as long (or short) as you want them to be, as you see fit. Unlike printed ads, there is no need for brevity - hurrah for the e-world! In fact, we think more detail would help increase response to individual ads. So put fingers to keyboard and go for it, go crazy and elaborate like a Baroque interior designer. After all, it is all for clarity.

November 2, 2005

Punctuation and the Almighty

As ads come onto the sites, it is my job to check they're ok. Recently on the London site I edited an ad posted by someone with an artistic approach to punctuation and grammar. The ad was for something fairly mundane, like a car stereo, but there was one point in it where the seller instructed readers that “for more information contact Me on …”. That tickled me: I suddenly had an image of an old man, with a long grey beard and wearing flowing white robes, sitting on a cloud and wondering what on earth he was going to do with that darned car stereo Archangel Gabriel gave him last Christmas, now that Jesus had just written his car off. Well, what on earth indeed, but sell it on Adzooks! Unfortunately, I decided the M had to go, in favour of an m; it just didn’t seem right that God would be based in Middlesex, not even in one of the nicer parts. Harrow on the Hill as the English Mount Sinai? I’ll carry on editing those ads.

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