American Airguns Blog
Friday, June 23, 2006
Website Update
As most of you know I have my own airguns website called American Airguns. I lay claim to it being the first published website about airguns since back in the fall of 1995, when I started my site, I had spent 3 months searching for any information about airguns on the web and simply couldn't find any. Soon after Tom and Edith Gaylord started up the Airgun Letter site that featured a fabulous airgun forum. Now there are all kinds of airguns sites on the web but mine has managed to endure all these years, mostly because of the classified ads.
I started my airgun classified ads page because all of the sites that had classifieds on them charged a lot of money for an ad and they didn't have hardly any ads. This was before eBay and the like. I decided I would offer a free ad site for the airgun community and it has remained that way to this day. In the beginning the ads were emailed to me and I put them on the page manually. This quickly became tiresome and as the page grew in readership it was overwhelming. Then I realized that I am a software engineer and decided to write a script in Perl to allow the readers to post their own ads. The script has been working well for a lot of years now but it is now time for a change.
I haven't been writing much in my blog over the past couple months, partially because of my work load and home life, but mostly because I have been spending my spare time learning PHP and MySQL. It is my plan to finally implement a login system to my classified ads page that hopefully will allow me to monitor it more closely and stop some of the problems that I have had with it over these past ten years. If all goes well, I will have a way to offer feedback on buyers and have a way to ban offenders from using the page (like those Nigerian scammers).
In the process of my classified ads renovations I am learning cascading style sheets (CSS) too so I plan to revamp my entire site and put additional features on it like a airgunner directory, events schedule, and a airgunners wanted. My plan is to allow the reader to place information onto the site directly like my classified ads. This will allow more information to be added and modified without my direct intervention. I want to automate my page as much as possible so that I have more time to shoot and test airguns! I expect these updates will take the better part of a 18 months since I have to work the updates in as time permits. However I hope that once I get the classified ads working and I have that experience under my belt the other pages will take less time to develop. Please let me know have any page ideas that might be useful for the airgun community. Thanks.
I started my airgun classified ads page because all of the sites that had classifieds on them charged a lot of money for an ad and they didn't have hardly any ads. This was before eBay and the like. I decided I would offer a free ad site for the airgun community and it has remained that way to this day. In the beginning the ads were emailed to me and I put them on the page manually. This quickly became tiresome and as the page grew in readership it was overwhelming. Then I realized that I am a software engineer and decided to write a script in Perl to allow the readers to post their own ads. The script has been working well for a lot of years now but it is now time for a change.
I haven't been writing much in my blog over the past couple months, partially because of my work load and home life, but mostly because I have been spending my spare time learning PHP and MySQL. It is my plan to finally implement a login system to my classified ads page that hopefully will allow me to monitor it more closely and stop some of the problems that I have had with it over these past ten years. If all goes well, I will have a way to offer feedback on buyers and have a way to ban offenders from using the page (like those Nigerian scammers).
In the process of my classified ads renovations I am learning cascading style sheets (CSS) too so I plan to revamp my entire site and put additional features on it like a airgunner directory, events schedule, and a airgunners wanted. My plan is to allow the reader to place information onto the site directly like my classified ads. This will allow more information to be added and modified without my direct intervention. I want to automate my page as much as possible so that I have more time to shoot and test airguns! I expect these updates will take the better part of a 18 months since I have to work the updates in as time permits. However I hope that once I get the classified ads working and I have that experience under my belt the other pages will take less time to develop. Please let me know have any page ideas that might be useful for the airgun community. Thanks.
