The Free Economy - Give it a go

[Scotness]

Hi all the site is running now - it allows you to give away things for free and to search for them as well - pretty well anything (legal) and anywhere in the world

http://www.free-economy.org/


please give it a go and give me some feedback too if you like

thanks

Scot

[TheGoodEarth]

some feedback too if you like

Tried to search for stuff close to me but didn't get any results. Are you trying to provide a similar service to freecycle??

[Scotness]

Similar to freecycle - yes - but where you can target specific items. As far as not finding anything - there's not much in there at the moment - why not give something away (but only if you like - don't want to sound pushy!)

:-) Scot

[daithi]

Well done on this Scot. The design seems sensible and elegant.

I've been absorbed with other things, so I haven't had much chance to use it. I'll quite likely be able to do so from now on however.

Regards
david

[mybarnconversion]

Can't find anything in there so of limited use ...

I think you need to feature most recent items wanted / offered etc. & broader search criteria - too many categories of good to start with, no one is going to repeatedly search and get no results. Also why all the countries? To (badly) paraphrase Start Local Think Global!

[Scotness]

Thanks for the posts guys - yes I do need to broaden the search criteria - a few people had suggested that - I wanted to discourage people jsut being greedy and trawling though for anything they don't need -- but then as you say you don't want to have to have too many specific searches all the time.

Having a latest posts listing is a pretty good idea - and if I can code it I'll probably do it -- thanks for the tip.

All the countries are there so people in those countries can list things for their local communities - or indeed anyone around the world. But it has to be there for both giving away and searching.

Scot

[daithi]

Hi Scot,

I have a few tentative suggestions for the project :
- allowing people to *share* things as well as give things away
- providing a contact *form*, which would allow people to be contacted without their e-mail address being displayed publicly
- allowing people to specify the length of time that their offer will remain in the database (i.e. a length of time other than the default 7 days)
- providing some sort of map?

Just some thoughts.

[Scotness]

Hi Daithi thanks for the response - sorry I took a while to get back to you - I haven't done anything on the site for a while so am catching up now.

Your ideas are quite good - the sharing one is good - i was thinking of doing a borrowing one - which is pretty much the same.

The form one is interesting - don't know how that would work or how I would programme it??

Nominating the amount of days was the initial plan - I've made it a uniform 7 just to make the programming easier - but once I get better at PHP I might go back to that!!

I'm about to modify it so you don't need to nominate the country you are looking for things in - that way it'll be easier to find stuff in the database - it's a bit hit and miss now where you have to nominate the object (even at it's broadest level) and then the country.

To be honest I'm pretty dissapointed at how little use it has got so far - but I really need to make it as user friendly as I can and then give it time I guess.

Some people have sugested I allow people to not nominate any good or service but basically get a printout of the entire contents of the database - but I don't want to do that as I want to keep people's searches a little focussed and purposeful and discourage that small percentage who are just greedy for anything - and I think having the broad level one searches with no country listed will be useful enough.

I guess we'll see!

All the best

Scot

[Scotness]

(double post)

[Scotness]

Alright just updated it now - so that you no longer need to specify a country when searching for something.

This means that basically you'll get all the items listed in the world that are in the database for any particular item you are searching for. I've thrown it open like this to try and make finding things easier.

You can still narrow down your searches by nominating country and town if you like -- and also on the definition of the object you can still go from broad right down to specific.

Hopefully this will make it a bit more useful.

Here's the link:
www.free-economy.org

Scot

[Muscroj]

OK, I think it's a great idea, and simple to use. I do think it would be good to be able to see a list of the latest things listed, I understand what you mean about people being greedy, but sometimes you may be looking for one thing & may see something else that you think 'oooh my mum wants one of those' etc etc. Especially as the site gets up & running, you need to 'advertise it' by letting people know whats available.

Also, I'm guessing that it's not been tested on a mac, as I couldn't get it to work at all using safari, had to switch to firefox to list my item

[Cloud]

Also, I'm guessing that it's not been tested on a mac, as I couldn't get it to work at all using safari, had to switch to firefox to list my item

Ah, That explains why it's not working for me either. If I select anything the whole form resets so removing my selection.
I'm using Safari (the standard, default web browser on Mac OSX).

[Scotness]

Hi Muscroj and cloud - thanks for your feedback.

I agree with the recent entries listing suggestion so have altered it now so that after you search for something it gives you those results and then displays the last 10 entries into the database as well.

As far as browser compatability goes that is a real problem - I thought I was using standard javascript - but obviously doesn't work on all browsers - I'll have to find a way that works for all - or have a browser detect routine in there. Either way I'll work it out - but that will take a bit of time! Thanks for the advice re safari -- I'll put a note on the front page about it only working with firefox at the moment.

You'll see when the recent 10 listing comes up there's a few test listings/junk in there - I'll delete them shortly - but there are some genuine ones in there too.

Thanks again

Scot

[Cloud]

Scott,

Safari reports these errors, which may or may not be the cause of the problem...

<font> misnested or not properly closed. Cloning <font> in order to preserve the styles applied by it.
http://www.mango-a-gogo.com/scot/econ/free-econ.htm (line 8)
<form> cannot act as a container inside <table> without disrupting the table. The children of the <form> will be placed inside the <table> instead.
http://www.mango-a-gogo.com/scot/econ/free-econ.htm (line 17)
TypeError: Undefined value
http://www.mango-a-gogo.com/scot/econ/free-econ.htm (line 445)
TypeError: Undefined value
http://www.mango-a-gogo.com/scot/econ/free-econ.htm (line 491)
TypeError: Undefined value
http://www.mango-a-gogo.com/scot/econ/free-econ.htm (line 539)

Yes, I know I'm a geek for even knowing how to turn on Safari's debug menu

[Scotness]

Thanks for that - the error code there is similar to the one in IE8 - I think I need to define the object first - which obvioulsy you don't have to with firefox.

Anyway I'll look into it - I'll download Safari too

thanks again

Scot