Daft.ie

Blog Archives

  • Daft has its busiest day to date

    By , Posted at 5:48 pm, January 4, 2012 in Daft News.

    Happy New Year, I hope everyone had a good Christmas!

    Every January at Daft we always see a big spike in traffic to our site and yesterday was no exception.

    According to Google Analytics, yesterday (3rd January 2012) we experienced our busiest day on Daft to date. We delivered more than 7 million page impression to over 180,000 visitors. Looking at our server logs, at peak we were handling over 620 requests a second.

    What’s even more interesting is that over 1.6 million of these pages (1,639,117 to be precise) were delivered to visitors using a mobile device - the Daft iPhone App delivered 904,448 impressions alone!

    Just to put that in comparison, back in 2005 we issued a press release about our busiest day to date. Back then delivering 500,000 page impressions to 16,000 visitors was considered a busy day!

    Another random interesting traffic stat for the day: Daft now has more iPad users than IE6 users!

    Ciarán
    @ciaranmaher

    Oh and we're hiring..

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  • We're Hiring.. think: PHP, Node.js, MongoDB, Linux, EC2, jQuery, Nginx, MySQL, Solr, Git

    By , Posted at 7:00 am, April 5, 2011 in Technology.

    Title grabbed your attention? Then come work code with us..

    We are always on the look out for good talent to join the Distilled Media development team to work on the next generation of Boards, The Journal, BoardsDeals, Daft and Adverts products and services.

    We have a number of job opportunities open from graduate to senior level positions.

    Ask yourself the following questions?

    - Do you want to code for the busiest websites in Ireland?
    - Ask the person beside you if they've used boards.ie, thejournal.ie, daft.ie, adverts.ie or boardsdeals.ie?
    - Would you like to work with the latest set of technologies in Ireland's fastest growing technology company?
    - Are you a believer in big ideas and looking to work at a company that can really make a difference?
    - Does it excite you that your code is used by 100,000's of people within seconds of being deployed?
    - Want to work in a modern office in the centre of Dublin using the best of tools?
    - Do you find yourself playing with web APIs and building web apps in your spare time?
    - Do you like developing to screen sizes of 480x320, want to build iOS apps or Android apps?

    We have a very high standard on our engineering team and are looking for smart, passionate developers. The role is an extremely rewarding one for the right candidate!

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  • QR Codes on Daft

    By , Posted at 10:53 am, October 6, 2010 in Technology.

    Just a quick post to let you know that we've enabled QR codes on all our links. In order to create a QR code for a Daft URL all you have to do is replace the 'www' in the URL with a 'qr'.

    So what's a QR code?
    A QR Code is a 2D barcode that is readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera and smartphones (there are loads of free QR apps available for both Android & iPhone phones). The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data. There's more info on the history of QR codes over on wikipedia.

    So what's this got to do with Daft?
    We've made it very easy to convert a link on Daft into a QR code that contains the URL, to use this feature just swap out the 'www' part of the URL with 'qr', this will enable you to print a QR code that links directly to your property or your search.

    e.g. http://www.daft.ie/searchsale.daft?id=557389 -> http://qr.daft.ie/searchsale.daft?id=557389

    Here's an interesting post that details how different companies are using QR codes.

    Have fun!
    Ciarán
    @ciaranmaher

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  • A picture speaks a thousand words...

    By , Posted at 1:03 pm, September 16, 2010 in Daft News, Technology.

    ...or so the saying goes, well now we've made it easier for you to let your pictures do the talking as we've rolled out a new image uploading feature to all our advertisers.

    You no longer have to upload your pictures one at a time - it's now possible to attach multiple images at once. You can also rearrange the order of the pictures, add a caption and we've also added a progress bar, to show you file by file uploading progress. Here are a few screenshots to show how the new process works.

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  • Daft House Price Report out today

    By , Posted at 9:00 am, April 7, 2010 in Daft News, Daft Report.

    The latest Daft house price report for Q1 2010 is just out.

    The report found that asking prices for residential property around the country fell by 3.4% during the first three months of 2010, the smallest quarterly fall in almost two years.

    The national average asking price during March 2010 was €234,000, a total of €120,000 or 33% below the peak in 2007.

    Read the full report, including a commentary by Brian Lucey, Associate Professor at TCD School of Business, at www.daft.ie/report

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  • Daft.ie gets a fresh new look

    By , Posted at 3:23 pm, September 27, 2009 in Daft News.

    We launched a fresh new look to Daft.ie today. From initial wireframe mockups to completed design, the whole process took us approximately 6 months to complete.

    With over 1.25 million people using the site every month we had to be careful not to radically change the overall look and feel of the site. Our main aim was to freshen up our existing design whilst making a number of improvements with regard to usability and page load times.

    For those of you that are interested, I'll be publishing a blog in the next few days detailing our whole re-design process.

    In the meantime, if you notice any strange issues or problems let me know at feedback@daft.ie or in the comments below.

    Ciarán

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