railslist.com - an opensource craigslist!

Today, I have successfully launched <a href="http://www.railslist.com">railslist.com</a>, an open source craiglist style classifieds script.

It is named as such to reflect the fact that it has been developed using rails.

It will be released to open source community today.

In the meantime, i would appreciate if you could take time to have a look, play around and let me know any issues.

This is a beta release and we will be releasing patches based on your feedback.

More features will be added as and when the community responds with their requirements.

This is my very first open source release, so please feel free to suggest me with your tips.

Regards

www.railslist.com

This looks great, still lacking user accounts? and non US cities, maybe you could export those from here http://www.geonames.org/ they have xml dumps. Nice work.

Patrick Aljord wrote:

This looks great, still lacking user accounts? and non US cities, maybe you could export those from here http://www.geonames.org/ they have xml dumps. Nice work.

Hurray!. At last I've got one feedback. Thanks a lot Aljord.

This script can be used to serve multiple countries by keeping each country in a subdomain and by running a separate instance for each country. This makes administration easier.

User accounts can be implemented as Rails has excellent plugins to do it. Probably, we can include it in future releases.

Why go with the same design as craigslist? I posted an ad and the speed it hit my email was very quick. -rob

Yes, why the exact same look ? IMHO the look of craigslist is to cluttered, and the design is most likely copyrighted. Looks fast.

Trausti

Trausti Thor Johannsson wrote: [...]

, and the design is most likely copyrighted.

At least under U.S. law, I seem to recall that designs aren't copyrightable (certainly fonts are not, which is why font knockoffs are possible). However, look and feel is coyrightable (or something similar) in the case of software. This could go either way, I guess.

Best,

I don't think style is that important, don't like it? Just modify the CSS and be happy.

Your SEO is not.. optimal.

http://www.google.com/search?q=railslist.com

Love the idea, and certainly would love to go through the code. However, I second the thoughts saying that a totally different design should be adopted.

One idea for the landing page would be a giant Google map centered in user's location with markers for every city

Google maps could also be integrated to draw search results in certain categories.

how to see the code? where to download it?

You mention that this is open source, but I don't see any mention of where to download the source code. If you really want good developer feedback then you may want to consider GitHubbing (is that a word?) the project which will allow us to download and play with the software.

Billee D. wrote:

You mention that this is open source, but I don't see any mention of where to download the source code. If you really want good developer feedback then you may want to consider GitHubbing (is that a word?) the project which will allow us to download and play with the software.

On Aug 15, 4:44�pm, Rails List <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net>

I am yet to release it. I will be doing it today. Before hand, I just wanted developers/normal users feedback, so that I can be sure that critical things work as expected.

It runs very quickly when it's working, but I did have a lot of intermittent downtime in-between browsing (1-2 minute spurts). [note: that may just be my ISP, a lot of sites seem to be going slow today].

For testing purposes, it might be better to just have a couple of cities. I was unable to find any other posts so I didn't spend too much time browsing.

I do agree that it is too similar to Craigslist (which is far from a perfect design to begin with). However, it is a great job so far, congrats! There are little things that still need to be worked on:

1) if a user submits a new classified, the app should auto-fill the city and category (when possible) 3) go to the user's posting after activation

Great ... where can we get the it ? Will localize and apply it to my region...

erwin

good job! with open source you mean we can all help you working on the project on github? I'm down with it!

I’m curious to know what the motivation behind this was. Makes a good proof-of-concept, perhaps you’re a student?

Otherwise, I don’t see any business value in cloning what Craigslist already does. If I’m going to post an ad, I’ll use Craigslist and suspect most people would. Posting an ad on a clone site doesn’t seem worthwhile…

Robby

Rails List wrote:

Robby Russell wrote:

I'm curious to know what the motivation behind this was. Makes a good proof-of-concept, perhaps you're a student? Otherwise, I don't see any business value in cloning what Craigslist already does. If I'm going to post an ad, I'll use Craigslist and suspect most people would. Posting an ad on a clone site doesn't seem worthwhile...

Robby

There is no business motive behind this. Having said that, it can be used for business purposes if one wants to.

I am shortly pushing it to github as well.

it can be downloaded @ www.classifiedscript.in.

can extract the archive with linux unzip for some reason

xeno@amrita:~/incoming$ unzip railslist-v1.0.zip Archive: railslist-v1.0.zip   End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not   a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the   latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on   the last disk(s) of this archive. unzip: cannot find zipfile directory in one of railslist-v1.0.zip or         railslist-v1.0.zip.zip, and cannot find railslist- v1.0.zip.ZIP, period.

winrar works though. do you have a finnicky FTP client? (i'm usually using some sort of scp when developing from Windows though, mayhaps you should to?)

Also, the zip on your site looks to be missing tests. Maybe you accidentally left these out when creating the zip ??

If RForum is the script that powers this forum and you posted via it, how can it be that it doesn't work?

Colin

Colin Law wrote: