Tuesday 9 September 2008

Quick Summary & old school newsgroup publicity ed.general

Got a lead from one of the property boards already. Watchers and visitors to the eBay auction.
Submitted the blog & site to Digg and Reddit & Yahoo!.
Old school academic publicity local newsgroup style, ed.general post.
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/ed.general/browse_thread/thread/7c6091183abd0448#

So the three methods being compared are

eBay auction
Google Adwords
Traditional hand done Seo, link begging & Blogging.

I will expend a similar sum on each and report the number and quality of leads and the best metric of all a sale.

Easily create Gigapixel images with a cheap megapixel camera and Free Hugin Panorama Generator

I am selling this Car Park in Leith Edinburgh for my mum, so I didn't have a big budget for the sort of wide angle photography necessary when shooting real estate.

I shot handheld with my 2 Megapixel Automatic Nikon, lots of differently exposed overlapping shots, turning round while standing still. I should have locked the exposure for each shot but well tempus fugit.

On my Ubuntu Hardy Acer 6502 laptop I threw the photos at Hugin, it chugged away for 20 mins, probably I could get it faster if I ran a 64 Ubuntu but 32 bit Ubuntu just works.

20 minutes of processing later I had 40 Megapixel images, stunning wide angle and 360 panorama shots - wow.

Hugin corrected the lens distortion, adjusted the different exposures uniformly, found matching points in different photos, rejiggered the perspective in clever AI Escher perspective math ways, and produced automatically these stunning images.

And Hugin is free!

Real Estate 40 Megapixel Panorama from 2 Megapixel handheld shots (Leith Edinburgh Johns Place Car Park).
Real Estate 40 Megapixel Panorama from 2 Megapixel handheld shots (Leith Edinburgh Johns Place Car Park).


Two layers make this dramatic photo of Johns Place Leith Listed Whisky Bond Building.
Johns Place Leith Listed Whisky Bond Building


Hugin stitched Panorama of Leith Links, Wellington Place, Johns Place, Edinburgh.
Hugin stitched Panorama of Leith Links, Wellington Place, Johns Place, Edinburgh.


OK so they aren't Gigapixel sized but the above practice should scale well and I'm getting a loan of a Canon A90 with manual exposure for consistency and 5 Megapixels, so Gigapixel here I come.

Oh yeh and if you want to help out and buy my mum's parking yard and vennel then just drop me a line or call, my number's on the Web page.

Monday 8 September 2008

Submit property Website URL to Google

I submitted my property for sale website to google as it hasn't been crawled yet.

heres the url

now for yahoo

Hugin Free Open Source AI Panorama Generator for realtors.

OK the Yard is up on Ebay.

Vennel & Half Share of Car Park Leith Edinburgh online Auction.

Ebay comes in @ £39 pounds for the weeks listing, There is a small ad option which I think get you the whole month for £39. Very confusing, usual ebay nickel and diming.
The main test I think will be between Ebay and Google adwords, which will be more cost effective, which will generate a sale ?

To be fair eBay only has a residential property section in the UK.

So the race is on Leith Property For Sale Personal Website versus Ebay.

Next Step Google Adwords Advertising, hopefully the UK Jumpstart Program means Google engineers design your advert and chat with you about how to optimise your website for sales.

Telephone chats with google woo :-)

Easy Web Page Panorama Scroller Edinburgh

Using Komposer HTML Editor for Ubuntu OS on my Acer Laptop I found this gem for scrolling panoramas.


div
style="width: 100%; height: 325px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); overflow: auto; text-align: center;"

just surround your panorama with the above div and it get scrollbars.
Made another panorama using the excellent Hugin.

This one shows Wellington Place, Johns Place, Leith Links and the Car Park.







Car Park & Vennel for Sale, Constitution Street Leith Links Edinburgh.

Trying Property Hat UK for leads

Googled for "free property listings uk" and found property hat free online property sales.

Submitted 4 photos and a Brief description for free.

Hugin Free Open Source AI Panorama Generator useful for realtors.


Hugin is the most amazing panorama program, very scholarly AI so it just makes great panoramas when you throw a whole bundle of oddly exposed lens distorted images at it.

I just have a cheap wee Nikon so wide angle shots are impossible, well using Hugin was a breeze and I think it produces really fantastic results.

It un-barrel distorts the photos, exposure balances them, seamlessly & intelligently stiches them together - giant megapixel images and panoramas pop out like toast :-)

Oh its free, totally free and if you use ubuntu it is in the repositories so you can just :
sudo apt-get install hugin
and it'll show up in your image & graphics menu.


Hugin Composite Shot of Listed Whisky in Bond Leith Docks Edinburgh


Both these were done in hugin from about 20 hand shot automatic 3 megapixel nikon shots. Showed it the photos and it took 20 minutes to pop these out without any interaction from me - peasy.
Step 2 new school web so blogging and I submitted to technorati to join the 'blogosphere'.

Add to Technorati FavoritesFavourite me to help with Technorati

I used my wee Nikon digicam and used the free panorama program hugin which stitched about 20 images together to make this wide angle shot.


Whisky Bond Car Park, St Johns Place, Leith, Edinburgh

Trying to Sell An Edinburgh Property Online Benchmarking

I am selling some property in Edinburgh and I thought it would be a good opportunity to test various methods of online sales and compare them. I'll post the results up here as they come in as a sort of anecdotal real world benchmark comparison of various methods.

The best metric is a Sale, but for comparison I'll also have numbers for leads and impressions.

The First Task is Old School, a website, static page with images and all relevant info, here it is:

For Sale Parking and Vennel Opportunity in Leith Edinburgh

The dotcom cost £5 at namecheap and the Linux Apache hosting £5.

I used Gimp and Ubuntu to make the photos gftp to upload them, hugin to make panoramas and firefox for browsing. So all the software is completely free.

and I'll submit to search engines when I figure out how.

Next an ebay property auction