New Articles

Some Reading

I thought it would be a good idea to write a little post on a new contributor who join up with us and they have author a few care related articles for the website.

They have been written by Anne Rickards and are a quality read if you have some time and are interested in the care sector.

Moving Into a Care Home Following Bereavement is the first contribution and then a following article Creating Cheerful Care Homes covering hens in care homes has been added.

We hope you enjoy reading these and we hope to bring some more quality articles for you to read.

Care and Nursing Articles

New Release: HTTPS Site Migration

Moving Over to a Secure Website

Our sysadmin has been very busy lately and has now completed the migration from http over to https which is more secure for our visitors with a secure connection being the default. The migration was quite simple because our code base does not use magic numbers or strings so all URL are references to a variable which is replace with the URL contained in the configuration.

Secure Website

Enabling a secure connection by default is the way forward so we decided to make the move over now. We use Apache SSL and SPDY as a module to help speed up connections from clients who support the protocol.

Testing has been accomplished by using a clone of the live server running inside a VM instance, we like to use Virtualbox for VMs although it is now owned by Oracle not Sun it is still open source and a great bit of software that I find very useful.

Setting Up Apache

We already have a setup for the secure site because it is used to process our payments securely although all other traffic is redirected to the non secure site.

We edited /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ssl.conf to configure the protocols we support and to disable ones which have vulnerabilities like POODLE. Here is a snipit of the configuration file.

SSLProtocol all -SSLv3 -SSLv2

SSLHonorCipherOrder on

SSLCipherSuite "EECDH+ECDSA+AESGCM EECDH+aRSA+AESGCM EECDH+ECDSA+SHA384 EECDH+ECDSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+SHA384 EECDH+aRSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+RC4 EECDH EDH+aRSA RC4 !aNULL !eNULL !LOW !3DES !MD5 !EXP !PSK !SRP !DSS"

Next we needed to install a copy of mod-spdy for any user agents who support it

wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-spdy-beta_current_amd64.deb
dpkg -i mod-spdy-beta_current_amd64.deb

Our rewrite file on the non secure site looks like this now it just 301 redirects all requests to their secure equivalent.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

SPDY for Apache

Installing this has really improved our website response time and it just seems snappier than the non secure site we installed a mod-spdy package but SPDY only works with modern browser but we do not support old browsers any more so this is not a problem.

The source code for it and the packages are available and it has now been donated to the Apache foundation from Google. You can download the 64bit deb package here this is the one we used since we have 64bit Debian.

Site Config

This was simple and we only have two string representing the sites full URL one in the main PHP config file and another in the SiteConfig JavaScript class file. This approach also simplified when we moved over the domain name from www.ucarewecare.com to www.carehomes.net.

Conclusion

Porting our website code over to HTTPS has been quite a simple process in the end this was helped by us not using string literals as our URL and instead using a token which uses a value in the sites configuration so all we did was change one string and they all changed.

Remember to never use magic strings or numbers in your code and abstract away a bit because it does come in handy sometimes.

Server Updates and Fixes

Fixing Bugs and Vulnerabilities

We have been doing some administration on the server and we have decided to enable Perfect Forward Secrecy on our SSL site to improve our security rating which can be viewed using this website we also modified some of the ciphers used.

Our server has also been patched and configured to cover heartbleed, shellshock and POODLE vulnerabilities which have all been made public and fixed already.

Bugs

Perfect Forward Secrecy

Enabling PFS makes our site more secure due to a new key being generated for each session rather than the same key being used. Again configuring this is quite simple.

Poodle

SSLv3 was disabled to cover the POODLE vulnerability which makes man in the middle attacks possible this process is simple and there is a good document about it here all you need to do is disable -SSLv3.

Shellshock

Bash has been patched to the most recent version although I would think we are not affected by this attack vector but it is better to be safe.

Heartbleed

This one was patched up a long time ago and we have no reason to believe that any of our private keys were leaked because it would be quite an obvious intrusion which we have not noticed.

Future Improvements

One improvement we will be implementing is using SHA256 when creating the certificate rather than SHA1 which is a weaker implementation this will be done when we update our SSL certificate.

We plan on moving the main website over to HTTPS with SPDY soon because we feel this is the way the web is moving and it offers more speed and security so it makes sense.

Minor Release: Improved Markup

Some Markup Changes

We have been making some small changes to the website recently to try and structure the markup at bit better and to move some content to make it less prominent and further down the page markup.

The top site heading The Care Homes Director has now been changed to a <h1> as it should be the main header for the banner section. It seems a valid thing to do since we are using the HTML5 doctype, and there is a good article covering it here.

HTML Markup

Bootnote

Soon we will be releasing an improved version of our care groups scheme allowing enhanced listing users to manage their care groups branch information and also the listing page for their care group. We hope to have an initial first version release coming soon.

Displaying Suppliers on Town Pages

More Exposure

Entries in the supplier directory are now being shown on our town pages for their area giving more exposure for our suppliers to the public and home owners.

We have some more improvements to come through on the supplier directory soon, if you are a supplier in the care sector please join up for FREE using this form. 

Gold Listing Scheme

Rewarding Quality Content

Our latest release includes functionality to allow our site administrators to turn an enhanced listing into a Gold Listing with the aim to make them stand out from the crowd.

Gold Listing Seal

Gold listings will be determined by the quality of the home or agencies enhanced listing page, to become a Gold Listing you must be an enhanced listings member which is FREE you can sign up here.

What Gold Listings receive*

• Listed on homepage of website (this may be on fair rotation)
• Promoted to top of listings for your town page
• Gold logo indicating your page is a Gold Listing
• Added to Region pages
• Displayed in local towns (more exposure)

What makes a Gold Listing

• Quality Content (body text)
• Complete Gallery with 5 images
• Complete home profile information
• Activities and facilities list
• Vacancy and bed numbers
• Social Media links
• Contact email (not displayed)
• Your website URL

If your listing has these qualities it will be made a Gold Listing by one of our Administrators in time although if you would like to apply to make it a Gold Listing just login and click the account tab and choose which home you want to apply with in the drop down and click the apply gold listing button and your request will be reviewed.

The reason we made these changes is that it allows our visitors to know the homes which are making an effort to provide them with all the information they need to make informed decisions concerning your home or agency, it makes you look good to visitors compared to a home with only a basic listing.

Boot Note

Progress is still being made with the job board and we are hoping to be releasing this service soon for both homes and nursing professionals.

We also have some more features being added to the supplier directory which you can join for free if you are a care sector supplier by following this link.


* Not all functionality is currently available as this is an initial release.

Improved Supplier Directory

New Release

We have been working hard improving our supplier directory and we now have support for scaled thumbnail images using the same code we use for our enhanced listing service. 

Page loading time has been decreased so there is no waiting for the page to load. Some of the code has been cleaned up and improved upon and we have run some tests to check everything is working OK.

This is our second main release for The Supplier Directory and we hope the improvements make our user experience better and that there are more releases to come.

You can sign up for a free listing by completing the form at this page.

New Feature Release: Care Groups

Grouping Homes Together

We have improved our data set by adding support for care groups this allows us to group homes by its owners, this supplements the type of ownership data we have.

You can find the main care groups page by following this link there is not much there at the moment but we will be adding to it as we go.

As usual we plan on improving this dataset and also make our offering in this area better than it currently is.

Care Groups

New Feature Release: Home Testimonials

Rating Care and Nursing Homes

Today we have release the first version of our home testimonials so residents and their families can add their thoughts on the service the home provides. Anyone can submit a testimonial for the home although they are all reviewed by an administrator before being made live on the website.

If you would like to submit a new testimonial its a simple as visiting the homes listing page and clicking the show form link in the testimonial section of the page.

Our hope is to open up the data from these testimonials via a public API so homes can display our testimonials simply and/or any other uses.

Testimonials

Free Enhanced Listings

Free Advertising Offer

Enhanced listings has been opened up and we are now offering a free signup and listing for all homes who add a few paragraphs of text and a couple of images using our web based administration panel.

We hope to get some nice content on the website from this so this is why we have opened it up if you want to sign up please complete the form at this page.

Free Webpage

Admin Release

Behind the Scenes

With our latest release we have been cleaning up some under the hood bug fixes and working on improving our administrative features to try and make our site admin jobs a lot easier.

Major improvements have also been made to the custom CMS system we have allowing us to manage our content better as we all know content is King.

Content is King

Testimonials is going into the final stages of development now then it will be tested and released to the public and we also have the job board coming up.

New API Improvements

Better Implementation

We have made some recent improvements to our API by refactoring some of the classes, adding a JSON output writer to complement the XML writer this allows us to use either format for API output by changing the URL suffix for the request.

JSON Output

The  old map XML code has been ported over to a new GeoApi module for handling all our map data requests such as the "other homes in this area" feature or local amenities map markers which is used to display local places of interest.

XML Output

Along with these changes we have created some new DTDs which go with our XML API output, there have been multiple bug fixes along with removal of some unneeded code which has been deprecated.

Our hope is that by implementing these changes we can provide data to the public via a uniform simple to use API. This will be ideal for when we release our new testimonials feature which we plan on opening up for public use.

Care Supplier Promotion

New Homepage Section

Our supplier directory is slowly being populated so we decided to run a promotion on our homepage by adding a new section to the bottom.

We thought it would be beneficial to both us and the supplier to promote the work they have done by adding a quality listing to our system.

You can view Andy's Gramophone Classics supplier listing and we hope to drive contacts to his page. They also have a Facebook page here which shows some pictures of his old records and such so, check it out!!

New Feature Release: Dedicated Global Feedback System

Simple Site Feedback

For our latest release we have implemented a basic feedback system on a global level so it is accessible site wide rather than using our contact form. We feel that having the link to the top left of the screen will encourage our visitors to help improve our website by leaving some feedback.

We hope to integrate this feedback system tightly with our systems over time in an attempt to improve these systems using genuine user feedback and other data we collect. We are also coupling it with our error reporting system to help improve our website even more.

Global Feedback Link

Feedback Page

New Alternate Domain Name for The Care Homes Directory

Going biz

The Care Homes Directory can now be accessed using a new domain name which is www.carehomes.biz this should redirect to our main domain using a 301 redirect using the Apache rewrite module.

New Feature Release: Recently Updated Care and Nursing Homes

Homepage Listings

We felt that it would be good for our visitors and home owners if we rewarded owners who keep their listing up to date by placing their listing on our homepage. We though that the last five updates should be shown at the bottom of the content area.

You can update a homes listing information by clicking the edit homes details link which is located under the homes contact information this has the advantage that the homes information will pre-populate the form.

New homes can be added by completing this form and once the information has been reviewed by one of our administrators will be made public and displayed to our visitors.

We have found our new and update home feature has been very successful and we have only had two junk submissions so far which is quite a good rate, our admin tools make it simple to remove these entries and they are very obvious to the eye.

Soon we will be release a new service for allowing homes or care related companies to post job vacancies on our site and we plan on tying it in with our top nurses product we also have some good ideas for features.

New Feature Release: Similar News Articles

Read Similar Articles

Our latest feature release has added support for displaying similar news articles allowing our visitors to read any article which matches the keywords for the current news article. All our articles have a set of tags allowing us to search the database for matches to those keywords.

We hope this will help promote our other articles better  and allow visitors to keep current with news specific to a certain subject.

Similar News Articles

New Feature Release: Listing Page Mashups

New Look Listings

Our listing pages now have a new look which is similar to a mash up we have removed all the tabs from the page and combined them all onto one page. The rational for this was everything seemed a click away and we were diluting our content by making the visitor browse different pages.

This way all the content for the care or nursing home is in one place and are no longer a click away which is how it should be. We hope this change is useful to our visitors mainly and we have a few more changes we would like to make in order to make it even easier to access our content.

Examples

Kestrel Grove Nursing Home
Bel-Air Residential Care Home
Advertise Your Care Home Here

Screen Shots

New Feature Release: Advanced Search

Search for Power Users

The latest release has added an advanced search function for our visitors allowing them granular search of our database we hope this will appeal to both visitors and power users of our services.

You can now search for homes and agencies in the UK by first part of postcode, town or county. To search for multiple postcode/towns/counties you can separate each one with a space.

For the initial version we have implemented some basic operators allowing you to control your results. Operators are currently only type: and room: but this allows you to filter your results even more.

Our home page now contains an advanced search widget making it easy for visitors to use the service and letting them know we now have a better search.

We still offer our site search which uses a different approach to the advanced search because it crawls the site and provides search for all page content the advanced search only searches homes and agencies in the database.

Below are a collection of example search words which are inside the yellow boxes we hope to add more operators and also filtering in future releases of our advanced search.

Search Examples

Find all homes in watford and bushey

watford bushey

Find all nursing and care homes in hertfordshire

hertfordshire type:nursing type:care

Find all homes in hertfordshire with 50 to 100 rooms

hertfordshire room:50-100

Find all care homes in hertfordshire with 30 to 100 rooms

hertfordshire type:care room:30-100

Enhanced Care and Nursing Home Accordion

Enhanced Listings on County Pages

Today we release a change to our main county pages on the website so they now include an accordion containing any enhanced listings for the county. We implemented an accordion which is collapsed on page load so we still have the county list above the fold.

We feel this improves the quality of the page by adding relevant content that is useful to the visitor but also adds another avenue of promotion to care and nursing homes which have an enhanced listing with us.

Collapsed Enhanced Listings

Expanded Enhanced Listings

New Feature Release: Home Facilities

Care and Nursing Home Facility Lists

Releasing our new add and update home form has been very successful and we have decided to add some more data points to our database. We have complied a list of what we think is a good start, you can see the list at the bottom of this post.

Form

Our form makes use of check boxes for inputting the homes specialisms, activities and facilities we decided that these are still be for multiple choice form fields.

We feel our form is complete now but as always we will be reviewing it in time so we can make sure its up to date and relevant we will also be reviewing both our activities and facilities lists to make sure there is no overlap between the two.

Listing

Our listing pages now have a new tab for displaying the homes facilities list we are considering combining both the activities tab and the facilities tab because they are similar and would also bulk up the pages a bit more rather than a small list on both pages. It also makes it one less click for our visitors so maybe in the future we will implement this.

It is already a popular feature and we have had a submission every day so far so we consider it a success so far and we hope that our visitors and home owners and managers find it a useful tool for them to take advantage of.

Conclusion

If you are a care manager or owner and your home is listed then all you have to do to add your facilities is go to your homes listing page and click the edit homes details link to open the wiki form.

Also I will also remind visitors they are encourage to help add any information we maybe missing for a listing.

Facilities List

Aromatherapy
Assisted Bath
Assisted Shower
Cable TV
Car Park
Cater for Special Diets
Chiropody
Companion Rooms
Dentist
Dining Room
En-suite Bath
En-suite Shower
En-suite Toilet
Garden
Hairdressing
Hydrotherapy
Internet
Jacuzzi
Laundry
Lounge
Massage
Minibus
Nurse Call System
Open Visits
Optician
PassengerLift
Personal Possessions
Pets
Physiotherapy
Purpose Built
Reflexology
Religious Services
Retained or Personal GP
Secure Storage
Sensory Room
Shop
Single Rooms
Stair Lift
Tea and Coffee Making
Telephone Points
Television Points
Wheelchair Access
Wireless Internet

New Feature Release: Update Homes via Form

Basic Wiki Like Features

Our latest release has added support for updating or adding new homes to the directory via an online form rather than relying on home owners and managers emailing us.

We use a staging table as a buffer between our live database and the new data which is reviewed by us before being copied over into the main database. We hope this will prevent abuse because any changes are reviewed.

In future versions we plan on adding to our data set as to make our visitors as informed as possible on what a home has to offer residents. We currently collect specialisms such as Dementia Care and also activities a home may offer but we would like to add facilities to our listings.

Below is a screen shot of a listing page for a random home I have highlighted the link for editing the listings details.

Edit Home Link

When you click the link you are presented with the wiki form for editing the existing homes details and the form is pre populated with the relevant data for the home making it easier to edit.

If you do not pass an id then it will create a new home. Below is another screen shot this time its the actual form used.

New Form

Any visitors to the website are permitted to submit a new home or edit an existing homes details in fact we encourage our visitors to amend any mistakes or missing information although we cannot guarantee that all submission will be added.

We also hope any home owners or managers will take advantage of this feature to show case their home to potential residents or their families.

Using the noodp Meta Tag

Trying to Control Titles

Recently we noticed Google appending text to our title tags which we did not want because we feel our titles are fine and its not Google's place to  modify our content.

It would appear that Google is appending our old brand name to the end of some of our titles and it makes some of them look really irrelevant.

For example if we did a care home related search it would show {OUR_TITLE} - The Nursing Homes Directory which look really bad if the search is care as it looks completely unrelated when in fact it is relevant.

Seems that Google is getting the appended text from the ODP (Demoz) listing we have which was still listing our old brand which was The Nursing Homes Directory.

In our attempt at trying to get these appendices removed from our titles we decided to use the googlebot meta tag and set the content to noodp which instructs Google not to use the ODP for extra information on our website

<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">

 
Currently this seems to have worked and most of our titles are back to normal for the affected SERPs. It is disappointing that Google has now decided to modify a websites content and I personally think they should not do it as I think the same with bubbling but that is another topic altogether.

Source Tree

New Feature Release: Add or Update Homes Direct

Visitor Home Submissions

We have release a new feature allowing our visitors to submit new care or nursing homes to our directory of homes. Allowing home owners to submit their details direct from their browser is more direct rather than having to send emails.

This makes our job as administrators easier because now all we have to do is click a link to activate the home or if its an update it will overwrite the existing one.

Our hope is this helps improve our data set and also make our lives and our home owners lives that bit easier.

Home Form

New Feature Release: Improved Saved Homes Lists

Improved Saved Care and Nursing Home List

After the successfully release of our new saved homes list we have improved upon the current offering by adding more data to the comparison table and adding the telephone number to the bottom home list.

You can click the link to call the home and if a suitable handler is found it will use that program to make the call so if you use a SIP phone you can call them directly from your PC. We use tel: prefix inside the href of the a tag which indicates to modern browsers that it is a telephone number.

We have added more rows to the comparison table so it now shows a homes specialisms in a quick easy to read format. We have red x to convey it is not offered and a green tick to show the service is offered.

For icons we discovered a nice set of free open images which you can find at this site. We are currently considering moving our icon set over to theirs so we can standardise our images making them look more uniform and consistent.

Our hope is that these improvements help our visitors make a decision between a list of candidate homes.

Saved Home List

Care Home Supplier Directory

Free Supplier Listings

Recently we have been working on a new section for our website which we feel will integrate nicely and is relevant to our sector and will provide our visitors with a useful service.

The service provides free listings for providers of services and products in the care sector so they can connect with care and nursing home owners. You can find the sign up form for this service by following this link.

Supplies

Service Features

Our initial version provides all the base functionality we feel is needed for the service and we have plans for future versions to add even more functionality to the system.

Signup is free to all businesses and once you login to our panel you can create the content for your new listing and also upload your companies logo (1Mb in size).

You can add your social media links, email address, telephone, fax and more we currently support Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Screen Shots

Below are some screen shot of the service the first one is the listing editor located in the supplier control panel. This allows users to add content to their page and manage their logo image. Our editor is similar to an office document editor and is simple to use.

Listing Editor

The main listings page is shown in the below screenshot this is the homepage for the supplier directory and it lists the current suppliers. We plan on adding some promotional areas to the layout of this page at a future date.

Suppliers Page

Final screen shot is the actual listing page for the supplier, we allow a single supplier per single account. Each single supplier gets a listing page which they can edit using the online editor via their browser.

Listing Page

Feedback

All user feed back is appreciated and we would welcome working with a supplier to improve the service even more. If you would like to send feedback or participate in improving your listing please contact us using this form and we will email you back. You could also contact me using Google+.

Conclusion

With the release of our new service we hope to connect care and nursing homes with suppliers who can provide them with quality services and/or products.

As with all software this will be an iterative development cycle trying to add specific features one at a time. We hope to build a great service for our visitors.

Visitor Care and Nursing Home Lists

Allowing Visitors to Save Personal Lists

Our  most recent release has added support for allowing visitors to save care homes and agencies to their own personal list of homes which can then be compared and viewed at a later date.

Saving Lists

To save a home the visitor clicks the Save Home link highlighted red in the screen shot below this link has an onclick handler registered to run the add method which contains the JavaScript for saving.

Town Listing with Save Link

HomeList.js provides all the client side functionality we need and it is this class which implements the add method mentioned above. We also make use of an external class name uuid.core.js which we use to generate a UUID for each visitor.

Our UUID uses version 4 of the UUID specification which can be found here we decided to use an existing implementation because if you look at the code I dont think it can be done any better.

We save this UUID in a cookie for two months and all homes added to a visitor list are deleted after seven days. Another constraint we have is that a visitor can only save 20 items to their list.

Listing Page with Save Link

Visitors can also add homes to their list from the actual listing page of the home which is highlighted red in the picture above.

Viewing Lists

Visitors can view their own lists by clicking the View Saved Homes link which is located in the top left corner of all pages and is highlighted red in the screen shot below. This link uses the top and right CSS properties with a position of absolute.

The current version only allows certain comparisons but we plan on increasing what you can compare and also select only what you want to see in later versions.

Visitor List

Conclusion

This feature has already been well accepted by our visitors and we are currently monitoring its usage and hope to improve the service even more in the future.

We also released a number of other features with this release and we will be writing about them in future postings so stay tuned.

New Feature Release: Local Amenity Map Markers

Showing Local Business on Maps

With the release of our local amenities listings we thought it would be good for our visitors to be able to visualise an amenities proximity to the home. This also complements our feature for displaying other homes on the map.

For homes we use the same red marker as used previously but for local amenities we use a blue marker allowing the user to easily differentiate between the two.

Map with Amenities

Our map implementation uses the Google Maps API v3 which is the current version we had to port the basic functionality over from v2 when support for it stopped. We have a basic class representing this along side our other custom Google classes.

We also make use of a custom API to fetch the data used to populate the map with markers and a separate library to handle all the map JavaScript.

Next we plan to add some more map controls and layers to aid our visitors and improve upon their experience which is one of our main goals.

New Feature Release: Improved Maps

Better Info Windows Markers and More

Our first release of the year and we have new improved maps for homes using the Google Maps v3 API we now have support for info windows for each home, new style markers, improved titles and improvements to the JavaScript library.

We have a follow up version in development now to provide markers for local amenities by allowing map layers using a checkbox control. This will allow our visitors to get an idea of were the local points of interest are.

Map With Markers