I’ve always subscribed to the “don’t reinvent the wheel” theory in everything I do, especially when trying to develop software. However, sometimes the wheel turns out to be a little lopsided.

Over the past few years, I’ve used a couple of different classified ad systems to run my fairly successful RV Classified Ads website, that my dad and I own, called www.RVClearingHouse.com. The first system I used was custom built and we paid $5,000 for it in 2000 and it worked really well. Well, long story short, we had a problem with the company that built the software and they turned off the site.

I then built my own system with PHP and MySQL, before I really knew what I was doing. It was simple and worked OK, but still wasn’t scalable. My company owns and operates over 2,300 small websites, so by the time I needed some new software to run my classified site, I figured I should just buy a turnkey system instead of taking the time to write my own. I did a little research and found that most people recommended the GeoClassifieds system, and I bought the $100 version first to try it out, but decided it was too limited and upgraded to the $700 version on a gamble. 3 years later, I’ve had nothing but problems with it and am now taking the time to develop my own, that will hopefully work much better than my first attempt.

I’ll admit that I’m pretty lazy when it comes to programming, so I looked at some various frameworks and decided that cakePHP worked the best for me. Now, some of you out there may agree or disagree with me, and that’s perfectly fine, but for me cake seems to do the job. I figure I have a couple more months of fine tuning my code before I migrate my existing ads (roughly 9,000) into my new system.

When I started brainstorming, I decided it would be a good idea to be able to add any custom field that I wanted to, based on a category. For instance, if I wanted an Items for Sale category and a For Trade category, the for sale category would need a price field, whereas the trade category would most likely not. I’m not sure if the method I chose to go about setting up custom fields in the database was the “correct” way to accomplish it, but it seems to work fine. Until I come up with a reason why it’s a horrible way, then I’ll stick with it.

Anyway, that’s about it for my first post. It doesn’t give you much useful information I guess, but at least you can get a sense of what another wannabe programmer is up to in the world. I’ll be back with more amazing adventures of The Geekinator!