Earlier this week, yours2share’s website underwent a fairly major set of improvements. I’ve been working on these for about five months and I can’t tell you how relieved I am that they have been implemented with relatively few issues arising. (I can’t believe I’ve just written that, I left a full time job in IT two and a half years ago, and I’m still conditioned to rephrase problems and bugs as issues!)
The underlying software of yours2share is coded in perl. Had I known three years ago how hard it is to find perl coders I probably wouldn’t have gone down this route. But you live and learn. Most perl experts in the UK appear to work on contract for specialist IT companies and their rates are, well, interesting.
I wasn’t too enthusiastic about getting major software development done on-line but I had to find another way. I’ve been working with my developer in Romania for five months and I’m impressed.
I’ve never spoken to him: our communication is entirely by email and Google chat. If I’d realised this at the outset, I’d have been even more rattled, but it works well and one fantastic aspect is that both he and I have a record of everything we have discussed so misunderstandings are much reduced. He types faster, better English than me when we chat on Google. The only downside of using Google chat is that long sessions are exhausting.
Working “alongside” him on Monday night reminded me of many previous “go live” implementations in my previous life. It was like having one of the many excellent IT contractors I’ve worked with over the years sitting next to me.
So what have we done?
yours2share remains free to use and I want to keep it that way. But people can now pay extra if they wish to make their ad stand out, or put their contact details onto it
Ads are sorted by the date last updated, which I hope will encourage people to come back and keep their ad up to date, and ads can now be viewed in the currency of the visitor’s choice – my American members will like this.
There are Googlemaps within each ad showing the location and the search function is greatly improved – the old search functionality used to drive me mad. Finally we’ve improved the security on the validation process.