ComputersMuna Development

Community Section in the Works

computersmuna — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:59:56 +0000

In case you guys are wondering, the site is still alive and is now getting more of my time than it did before. Right now, I’m busy working on a community section for the site where members can share and discuss both technical and non-technical topics. It should be out within the next week or two.

I also have some other features planned for the website. I’ll post a list as soon as I sort out the order in which I’ll be doing them on.

Minor Fixes and List Sorting

computersmuna — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:14:00 +0000

Found and corrected a bug in the search results page where the pager at the bottom uses the incorrect set of links. The site doesn’t have a lot of data right now that’s why it didn’t get spotted.

Other than the bug fix, a sorter drop down list has been added to the catalog and search result pages. Now you can view your lists sorted by item name, price or date of posting – all in ascending order.

More changes coming within the week, so please keep an eye on us for updates.

Bump Your Old Items Up!

computersmuna — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:32:44 +0000

Just rolled out a new feature that lets item owners “bump” their items up to make them visible on the front page of the website again.

Compared to other implementations from other classifieds websites, our approach discourages item owners from spamming their item’s inquiry board with *bump* or *up* messages. Doing those things won’t bubble up their items.

Instead of bubbling up items on new negotiation messages, we allow items to be manually bumped up once every 24 hours. This way, each item has a fair chance of getting some exposure on the new item lists on the front page – the Bumped For Sale Posts and the Bumped Looking For Posts.

Other than the bump feature and the two new lists, you’ll also notice that the organization of the lists have been changed to tabs for a more compact layout.

Image Attachments and New Categories

computersmuna — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:22:13 +0000

Out of the list of requested features that we got from veteran sellers of other gadget trading community sites, two of the most requested – and we think are big wins – are:

Image Attachments
Additional Categories

When posting an item, we’re now letting you attach up to 4 images for your item. For now, we’re limiting the file size of each image to 200kb, and only accepting JPEG images. These are temporary limits while we’re still working on modifying the feature to upload attached images to ImageShack. When we get this done, image hot linking shouldn’t be a problem either.

Because of the additional of images, the front page and the catalog pages (search and browse) now require a new look, which can include thumbnails. We’re working on this, and we think we’ll push the ImageShack update first since it’ll greatly help shave off some of the bandwidth requirements for the page.

For the additional categories, we added the following:

More categories may be added, depending on the number of users needing them. Eventually, the category list on the left side will require a new layout so it doesn’t stretch the page too much.

Cloud Computing for Web Startups

computersmuna — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:31:26 +0000

Years ago, online storage, CPU time and bandwidth are usually the top three things that stop would-be web entrepreneurs from launching their online projects. Not unless they have enough capital to fund these expensive requirements. As years went by, hardware got cheaper and so did the cost of bandwidth. Now, big and new companies setup free services that let you offload some of the bandwidth and computing power your website needs to them. I think they call this cloud computing – using the internet as your infrastructure and as your OS.

While setting up ComputersMuna.com, making full use of these “cloud” services were at the top of our list. We didn’t have startup money, and it is just a hobby project.

So far, our only expense is web hosting. We’re currently being hosted on a Linode 720 account running Ubuntu. We don’t have a lot of resources allocated for the site, but until our traffic picks up, this package is more than enough. How will this setup be enough? We decided to offload the following services:

Incoming Email – for this, we went ahead and signed up for Google’s hosted email services. The service is free and it gives you more than enough space for your email. Not to mention the reliability of the infrastructure and spam filtering.
DNS Service – for this, we decided not to run our own DNS server and use our host’s instead. More CPU time for us.
RSS Feed Hosting – we find Feedburner to be the most reliable provider for this.
Site Statistics & Analytics – we think having Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and W3Counter gives us more data than what we need.
Blog Hosting – this article you’re currently reading is being hosted by WordPress.com

With development still ongoing, another requirement that we want to offload is image hosting, which ImageShack provides for free through their Developer API. The API they have is great because other than hosting, they can also do image resizing for you. So you don’t just save bandwidth, but computing power as well.

Other than image hosting, another ideal candidate for offloading is site search. This can be done successfully through search giants Google and Yahoo!. Updates may not be as real-time as when you do your locally, but it works, and definitely scales well.

Other services that are of interest to us are SVN Hosting provided by Beanstalk, friendly project collaboration by Basecamp, and the nifty gadgets provided by Netvibes.

Calling on these choices places the site’s operations on a lot of external dependencies. But looking at the track record of each of those service providers, we think that we’re pretty much in good hands. A lot of savings, and a lot of reliability.

If there’s a good time to setup and get started with an online business, that time’s definitely now.

ComputersMuna.com Soft Launch

computersmuna — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:25:20 +0000

Last night, we just finished setting up the system completely. All the necessary features for a classifieds website are working (hopefully). All we need now is some PR goodness and I think we’re set.

Here’s a rundown list of features that ComputersMuna.com has:

Add, Edit, Remove, Activate, Deactivate items in your inventory
Items added stay online for 14 days, after which, they’re deactivated and stays in your inventory
Bookmark items you find interesting
Buyer and seller ratings are separate – Item sellers are rated as sellers, item buyers are rated as buyers. Users can have both kinds of ratings.
Send and receive private messages

The features we have right now are in no way final. These are just the basics and we want to get these basic things right first before moving on to the next set.