How did you recruit your babysitter?

[Chuffinnora]

I need my social life back and need to find a babysitter. I can't ask any family members, friends all have kids and we wouldn't be able to go out together and none of my neighbours or friends have any handy teenagers I could ask. I checked the babysitting sites but none have a sitter in my area. Any ideas?

check out the new babysitters thread seems to be sitters in most areas.

london is spolit for choice

overthemill, great site! Glad to find it.

Got a technical question/issue though.

As far as I can tell your search facility doesn't cross county boundaries...

I live right on the edge of three counties, yet the search within 20 miles facility only brings up ones with the same postcode stem as me.

This is daft - when I searched on the neighbouring town (which is within 20 miles but has a different postcode town) - more potential babysitters come up but I wouldn't have found them had I not tried this.

Do you need your search facility to be a bit more complex?

thanks for comment - will give it to tech guy and he can check this out.

so far as i understand it the p/code search searches radius of the centre of the postcode using some kind of satnavtype software (as used by loads of other sites i think). i owuld love it to be better as i am weary of people who use town search and get daft results, ie i am mk45 so the town search software for me would put me in milton keynes. not useful as i am actually about 20 miles away, in different county etc!

Puddlet - When I babysit, I just take over at whatever stage the parents are at when I arrive. That could mean doing bathtime, evening feed etc.
If you put you DD to bed, then go out and she wakes up, I would expect the sitter to resettle her, give bottle feed if appropriate. Personally I don't call parents home... can't recall when I've ever done that.
I find it is best to stick to whatever bedtime routine you may have. But if you find that your DD has noticed that something is up... then don't put pressure on yourself or her... be relaxed about it and just keep her up for the sitter to put to bed.
When your sitter comes for a pre-visit, then go through things such as where to find feed equipment and how you prepare feeds. Your DD may well have a preference for feeds to be at a certain temperature for example.

Postcode systems I have developed in the past have used a set of around 3000 postcode to Lon/Lat points - Postcode Districts. This is sufficient to give a reasonable estimate on distance but is not precise. To get precise you need to hold all postcode points in Lon/Lat format (so Postcode: District with Sector and Unit - around 1.7 million records) which Royal Mail charge for on an annual PAF licence (thus costly - bph-postcodes says a little under £1100 per year).
So sites which don't charge a user very much have to compromise between search accruacy and how much they can afford to pay for the data.

Something that houseprice data sites are now doing is using Google Maps to show locations.
So for a babysitter search type system, you could center the map on the postcode entered by the parent, and plot on the map the locations at which there are babysitters. However, doing this reveals the postcodes of those individual babysitters.

nannynick, that is what we will do. want to keep cost as low as possible.

Overthemill.. I am in near an airfield/university (does that help at all lol) don't really want to type it out on here..

Where abouts are you?

well i think so. you must be where i am thinking of. how exciting! i think i must have come very near you to collect our new chickens. lovely around there. we moved to the county in december so are still getting to know it

oops we are in a place that describes the colour of a piece of arable land.