MotorMutt launches on Octane Magazine

I've linked up with Dennis Publishing and together we've created a MotorMutt search engine for Octane Magazine.

Octane is focused on performance and classic cars worldwide giving the MotorMutt crawler plenty to chew on. In the process of creating the site, I've found some fantastic cars for sale all over the world. Not surprisingly the USA has plenty to offer, but I've been surprised at the variety of cars available in Holland particularly.

Searching for high end exotica such as Carrera GTs and SLSs reveals a healthy supply of them in mainland Europe and there are some really fascinating older exotics out there too.

Currently the site has around 6,000 cars (almost all performance or classic models) and that number is increasing week by week.

The MotorMutt search engine will be fully accessible from Octane's site later this week, but you can preview it here:

http://octane.motormutt.com

Private ads are available for free too!

MotorMutt.com is nearly off its leash

I've got a new car flavoured website. About time I hear you retort after four years devoid of petrol webness.

The new venture is a used car search engine. Before you exclaim that I lack imagination, please bear with me. You may well have encountered some car sites laying claim to the term "Search Engine", but as I've found they're all a bit 1998. In my view a web site thrusting a form full of drop down lists of make, model and budget doesn't constitute a search engine. Search should mean search, not selection.

Proper, sexy search

I've built a system that will (attempt to) understand more vexing interrogations such as "Manual E46 Coupe" or "Mark 2 escorts".  I want easylust Zagato Astons, RS3100s and blagging Jaguars.  For less petrolveined types, I'd like to be able to answer queries such as "diesel audi up to £10k", "red mini estates" or "hybrid hatchbacks".

Finding, Not Waiting

Secondly, to get the full inventory of exotica no 'search engine' should be sitting around waiting to be told what's for sale. The world's purveyors of car porn shouldn't have to work out how to do overnight XML uploads to your super aggregating FTP dropbox parsing aggregator. A search engine should search the web and find cars. Crazy huh?

Woof

The new site is called MotorMutt. Yep, it's a searching dog type thing. Maybe that's a bit 1999 too but rather than spend six months drinking coffee with a brand consultancy, I've concentrated on building the damn product.  Crack on I say.

So where's it at? Well I've been at it since March and the Mutt's looking pretty well groomed. It'll spill onto the web like an overturned cappucino all too soon, but if you'd like to have a peek then please let me know your email address via my site at www.blatters.com and I'll whizz you an access code. Early adopters, forward thinkers and Mr Nosy welcome.

Please follow the Mutt's progress on Facebook too. I'm hoping he'll have an exciting life.

Amazon Simple Email Service

I've just started experimenting with this. The Amazon tool set is great, but it does sometimes lead you into scripting hell.

The Amazon documentation describes how to verify your email addresses using perl scripts. That took me an hour or so of downloading and updating my perl config to get the damn things to work.

Then I discovered this blog entry:

http://www.alexkorn.com/blog/2011/04/sending-email-aws-php-with-amazonses/

which shows you how to do it via a line of code in the PHP SDK library.  So much easier...