Redfin is happy to announce SitemapGen4j 1.0. SitemapGen4j is a library to generate XML sitemaps in Java. Download SitemapGen4j 1.0 What’s an XML sitemap? Quoting from sitemaps.org: Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is… Read More
Those of us on the Redfin data team see every data problem that gets reported by our users. Of course, if we were to respond directly to each of them, we’d never get anything else done (okay, our data’s not that bad), but luckily the product management team takes care of that for us. One… Read More
There comes a dreaded time in every developer’s life when the inevitable happens – you are forced to switch to a new machine, and re-configure the entire dev environment you spent months (or years, in my case) tweaking and perfecting. For me, that time unexpectedly came last week when the hard disk on my laptop… Read More
Whenever I out myself as a member of the Redfin search team to someone who has used Redfin, one of the first questions I get is, “so why do you guys use the Microsoft Map? Why didn’t you choose Google?”. The full answer is a bit long, but the short answer is easy: speed. Every… Read More
A few months ago I attended the PostgreSQL conference in Portland, OR. There were a lot of talks ranging from hard-core stuff like Neil Conway‘s talk about the internals of query execution, to random fun stuff like David Fetter‘s discussion of procedural languages, including LOLCODE. During their talks, a few people mentioned a handy function… Read More
A couple of weeks ago we released an upgrade to the Redfin site. Some of the changes were obvious: we now support Safari, we show polygons for different region types on the map (cities, neighborhoods, zip codes, etc.), we show price history on the listing details page, we allow users to download search results as… Read More
A number of users have asked us to add a Walk Score widget to our details page and unfortunately we’ve been busy working on a few other things. Fortunately a crafty Redfin Forums user created a Greasemonkey script for Firefox to add a link to Walk Score on our listing detail’s pages. To install the… Read More
Listing alerts is a Redfin feature that lets you keep track of new listings in your area. You start by doing a search on our map page, and then you click on the “Save this Search” link: This lets you assign a name to your search and save it. You can also sign up to… Read More