ausroomies.com.au launched!

January 31st, 2009

Over the past month or so I’ve been working on a site to enable people to find share accommodation here in Australia. I was a big fan of Gumtree’s simplicity but didn’t like how little control I had as a room seeker to really narrow down and organize the listings I’m interested in. I think this is, in part, due to the fact Gumtree is a site for generic classifieds rather than specifically for room seekers — which is totally understandable. However, so far I’ve found other room mate finder services to be over-complicated either requiring me to sign up for a membership (which I hate doing) or to fill out a big scary form in order to find a room. No thanks!

The site was originally written using Merb but a nasty DataMapper bug combined with lacking documentation lead me back to PHP, which sucked. On the plus side, this is my first project using the Symfony framework which really is quite nice as far as PHP frameworks go. I’m a little dubious about the direction in which the framework is headed in the medium to long term, but for this little project it was great.

So that’s how ausroomies came to be. The site’s not perfect and I’m especially worried about whether people will actually stay long enough to play with the search engine to see what it can do. My logs from the first day are indicating the answer is a big, fat “no”. Somewhat predictable I guess. Maybe it’ll become more useful as we get more data. I think the dodgey programmer design currently leaves a lot to be desired, too. I hope to resolve that in a month or so. Outside of that, I can’t convey how much of a relief it is to finally get it live and to finally have something to show for it compared to all the usual throw-away experiments and prototypes I usually play around with.

Anyway, now that this has launched I should hopefully be able to return to a relatively normal sleeping pattern. I’m keen to hear the good and bad, so please drop me a line if you have any feedback regarding the site.