We receive many feature requests of which some we can do quickly, some are great ideas but will take us a while to implement and some shall we say `insane` recommendations.

Fortunately, one of our most frequently requested features was the ability to add parking space locations to a Satellite Navigation system.

Now, once a booking has been confirmed you will be greeted by a very friendly looking button. Simply click on the button to interact with your installed TomTom navigation software.

We hope to add support to other Satellite navigation devices shortly.

Thanks and keep sending us your suggestions and feature requests,
Your GPS enabled ParkatmyHouse.com Team

From 23rd - 24th April ParkatmyHouse.com exhibited at ParkEx, Europe’s largest dedicated parking event.

Now let me just say that this was a new experience for us! We were not there to discuss the differences between Pay and Display machines in Newcastle and London or the material used for penalty charge notices. Nor were we there to get excited about the new techniques parking enforcement agencies were using to make us pay up and although a rather more exciting conference was going on next door (an event planning conference with champagne fountains, celebrity look-a-likes, model agencies and sushi tasting experiences) our aim was to increase awareness of ParkatmyHouse and overall the two days were a big success.

We talked to a number of interesting companies, both large and small and we look forward to working with a number of them in the future. If you were one of the unlucky ones and didn’t attend ParkEx and would like to talk to us about potential partnership opportunities please get in touch.

The well informed folks at Startups.co.uk have put together a list of “the UK’s most innovative, inspiring and ground-breaking new companies” and ParkatmyHouse.com has been included alongside BeatthatQuote, Yotel, Trusted Places and other up and coming new businesses.

Have a quick look at the ParkatmyHouse.com entry.

Thanks again for all your support.

The proud ParkatmyHouse.com Team

Firstly let me apologise to all the Clint Eastwood fans who are reading this post thinking I was going to share some secret plots or start rumours about potential sequels. For those that are die hard Clint Eastwood fans please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good,_the_Bad_and_the_Ugly for all there is to know about this great film and the great man himself.

Dealing with strangers can as the title suggests end in one of three ways:

1. The Good - Everything goes swimmingly well and you can’t wait to see each other again in the future.
2. The Bad - Road closures, delayed payments and minor earthquakes can all lead to frustrating experiences.
3. The Ugly - Scratches, bumps, fisticuffs and crying babies can all lead to one of those days in which you wonder why you got out of bed.

Since the very beginning, ParkatmyHouse.com has had a feedback system in place so you can tell the rest of the ParkatmyHouse community what your experience was like with each individual or comapny you have had a booking with.

Until now, no matter what feedback you received (positive, neutral or negative), there was no way to bat your own corner and explain why a problem may have occurred.

Not anymore!

When you are looking through your feedback (by clicking on the `Feedback Received` link in your account navigation menu), you will see a small reply button . Simply click on it to respond to any feedback previously given to you.

More improvements are on the way!

Your ultra-busy ParkatmyHouse.com Team

We have been listening to your comments and have implemented the following improvements:

1. Printable booking confirmations are now e-mailed to renters once a booking has been confirmed.
2. Parking space owners will now receive an e-mail detailing all the bookings due to start on the following day.
3. When completing a booking, you can now specify number of spaces to be rented.
4. We have added a new left hand side navigation menu for registered users - all the information and links you could possibly need are now much easier to find. Checking your messages, previous bookings and even signing up to free text message alerts are now only one click away.
5. The bottom navigation menu has been expanded to include all the major sections of the website.

As always, we would love to know what you think about these improvements and how we could make things even better. Please contact us with any new suggestions.

Happy Parking!
The ParkatmyHouse.com Team

Google is a mystery to most and a saviour to others. Thankfully, all of us at ParkatmyHouse know quite a bit about getting our listings as high up the rankings as possible.

As you can imagine, everyone wants to be top… including us! We therefore spend hours and hours every week tweaking the site a little bit to make it more Google (and Yahoo, MSN etc.) friendly.

Although we are working hard, we could also do with some help.

If you or any of your close friends or family own websites or blogs, a quick mention of ParkatmyHouse.com, a link to our site and a link directly to your parking space listing or search results page will really help move your listing up the search engine ladder and help increase awareness of our funky (and very useful) service.

As an added bonus, if we really like what you’ve written, we will link to your masterpiece from the articles section of our site.

If you have any questions about linking to us, writing about us or any other aspect of our service then please contact us.

Your search engine friendly ParkatmyHouse.com Team

I can’t believe we are in March already, this time last year we had just over 1,000 people using the site, needless to say we have grown significantly since then and to our knowledge can be proud of having the largest parking space community on the internet.

With big events taking place at Wembley Stadium and Twickenham Rugby Ground in London over the next few weeks we expect to receive countless enquiries for that much sought after driveway. If you have a spare space, please add it now!

On a completely different note, I noticed yesterday that we have a parking space for rent near the airport at the North pole in Alaska.

Thankfully, the space isn’t within the confines of an igloo and from what I can tell by the picture, is safely away from the local and apparently soon to be extinct Polar Bear population.

ParkatmyHouse is really spreading to the different corners of the world. All we need now is someone in Antarctica to post a spot and we can claim complete global coverage!

A few days ago we quietly added support for all our users who have a parking space or parking lot they wish to sell. Selling is a completely different kettle of fish from renting and our site works a bit differently in how we connect buyers to you.

Once an enquiry is made, we will pass it on to one of our real estate partners who will arrange all the relevant viewings and act as a mediator to allow the transaction go through as smoothly as possible.

ParkatmyHouse.com charges a 5% success fee which includes all the listing, marketing and real estate agent fees. Please note that this fee is only payable once the transaction has been completed, so as usual, if you don’t make money, we don’t make money.

After launching in the UK just over a year ago, we are happy to announce that Americans and Canadians can now join the exclusive ParkatmyHouse.com club!

The ParkatmyHouse.com website detects what country you are visiting from, therefore there should be no need for you to change your default location. Should you want to browse through exciting parking spaces in other countries, you can easily do so by clicking on the relevant flag at the bottom of each page (see below):

Have you got friends on the other side of Atlantic who could benefit from our service?
We would love you to tell them how great ParkatmyHouse.com is!

As you all hopefully know by now, ParkatmyHouse is available in 7 different countries. We can hardly believe it either. Cultural differences aside, the differences in the way we write addresses and postal codes can be a frustrating problem when catering for multiple audiences.

US Zipcodes are easy to remember and recognise, especially 90210 (for Beverley Hills) - which we can check for by looking for 5 consecutive numbers.

UK Postcodes have a slightly more complex structure. A typical postcode will look something like this `SE1 4BN` but to check that a postcode has been entered correctly we have to use something ugly looking like `/^[A-Z][A-Z]?[0-9][A-Z0-9]?(?:\s*[0-9][ABDEFGHJLNPQRSTUWXYZ]{2})?$/i`

You can probably work out what the above jargon is doing if you look at it closely.

Canada have something just as ugly `/^[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXY][0-9][A-Z](?:\s*[0-9][A-Z][0-9])?$/i`

Fortunately, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands have simple 4 digit postal code systems. Curiously though, Ireland is yet to adopt a post code system which begs the question `How do the postman know where to take the mail?`

In addition to checking the accuracy of an entered postcode we also need to know the exact coordinates of each postcode in these countries. A problem solved thanks to a fantastic service called Geonames who have provided us with nearly all the postal code data we could ask for.

The idea of the GeoNames project is to aggregate national and local data and combine it into one global open source project. Their main goal is to provide useful data and web services.

If you have a map based project or require any geographic data including population statistics, head over to www.geonames.org and take a look around.