SA Dealers News and opinions about topics in general

If you have an active advertisement on www.sellstuff.co.za then you will (hopefully!) be pleasantly surprised by the changes that I have made to the contact email, you know the one you get when people want to ask you a question.

I have changed the format to send html email, added the sell stuff logo and sorted out the fact that the line breaks in the message always dissapeared.

What I have also done is added the privacy policy for the site as well as a quick terms of use document, I will be expanding this soon.

Lastly I added a field to the new category suggestion form where, if you suggest a category, you can now add your email address so that I can contact you when the category has been created or if I need to ask you a question.

In the near future I hope to make some style changes to freshen the site up a bit, so if you have any suggestions LET ME KNOW!

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates

Here is a list of suggested categories for www.sellstuff.co.za that I never created for some or other reason (obscured by the mists of time) Does anyone think I should create any of the categories in the list?

Bikes under R22000

cheap (under Bikes For Sale / Scooters – Mopeds For Sale )

granny flats for rent (already have Flats to Rent on the site!)

Walls Gates Fencing

Building

Weight Loss

So if you think I should be adding any of these or any other category on www.sellstuff.co.za let me know!

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates

I am happy to say that I the sites are now running on a new shiny dedicated server!! Whohoooo!

Unfortunately I have run into 1 or 2 teething problems, example www.sellstuff.co.za was still pointing to the old server, and then when that was fixed you could not post new ads!!

This has been rectified, but if you have any other problems, please please please let me know.

I now have full control of the server, so can make configuration changes as I need, lovely!

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates, SA Dealers Updates

A new feature has been added on www.sellstuff.co.za.

When you view an ad at the bottom of that ad you will see related items, in the case of motorcycle or car ads it will match the make of the bike/car advertised and the area as well, this will apply to all ads within that category.

In the other categories where there is no manufacturer, you will see a list of items in the same area with the category.

This should help you find ads similar to the ad that you clicked on, or came to via a search engine.

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates

So you may have noticed that for a while on Sunday, the websites were down.

My account was suspended because I had been tying up the mysql server from one site. My guess is that because all the traffic from bikemart.thesaweb.co.za and automart.thesaweb.co.za was going into one url www.sellstuff.co.za that the code that was working fine on 3 seperate sites now looked to be way too resource intensive.

So I spent a good part of Sunday optimising my code to minimise the calls to the database, which is a good thing because now all the pages on the site load much quicker. I am going to go one better than that by actually caching the ads title and so on.

Currently for each page I get a list of which ads should display then loop through each of those ads, each time selecting that ad from the database to build the title, then one by one I build the lines on the page.

What I am going to try and do now is to generate a small text file the first time that the ad is needed in a list, then every time the ad comes up to be displayed on the page I will simply open that file which contains the url string, ad title and the path to the ads thumbnail (if it has an image).

This will lessen the load on the database as well as speeding up the page (because opening a file is quicker than making a call to a database).

If the user edits thier ad then I will simply delete that cache file and it will be re-generated again when the ad is displayed.

Hope this helps to improve your experience when visiting www.sellstuff.co.za

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates

bikemart.thesaweb.co.za and automart.thesaweb.co.za have been merged into www.sellstuff.co.za

Reason for this is that www.sellstuff.co.za displays all the ads that bikemart and automart used to so it seemed a bit of a waste of resources to have all three running at the same time.

On a different note I have added a number of categories to www.sellstuff.co.za between December and now, but have never actually let anyone know. So if you did send in a category suggestion, check the site it should be there!

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates

Just added a new category to www.sellstuff.co.za for Photography/Cameras. check it out.

Remember that we add the categories you want!

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates

I have added a new category to www.sellstuff.co.za at the request of a visitor.

Category is Evening Wear. No ads yet, but hope there will be soon.

I did have a request for an `adult` category, but am not going to create that cos it will get me banned from Google Adsense (Sorry to whoever requested that!)

If you have any ideas for new categories, give me a shout!

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates

You may or may not know this but, I also have a classifieds website, www.sellstuff.co.za.

Well anyway, I have noticed that some fool has started spamming the advertisers on the site, so I added some CAPTCHA text to thwart them. MAN I hate spammers!!

I mean seriously, what kind of idiot actually believes people will buy the sh!t they get through an email with terrible english?

Reminds me of way back before I wrote the new classifieds when a guy (from somewhere in asia) would create ads, saying “wow! nice site! buy viagra” with a link. WTF!?!? F@#k off and die d!ckhead, try do some seo then you want need to do cr@p like that!!

So my point is if you have ads on www.sellstuff.co.za, or automart.thesaweb.co.za or bikemart.thesaweb.co.za I apologise for any inconvenience caused but want you to know that it is sorted now.

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates