Bargain Fiending is Tiring Business and Other News

So, BargainFiend.com is barely a week old now, and is well on its way to being completed.  I need to explore my options for finding a HS or college student to post deals on the site (for cash), and find a way to expire deals more efficiently.  After all, I’m a full time programmer… I can only do so much to keep the site up and maintained during the day.

I haven’t worked on the eCommerce site lately, or on the local ratings site, but I’ll get on those here soon.  Hopefully, those will be successful.   

Apart from the web, in real life news, Katie and I are doing well.  We’re shopping around for some computer furniture for the office (since her Mom is snagging my current desk).   We’re also planning a trip for sometime this summer… Katie’s eyeing Nashville, or Vegas.  I’m eyeing my wallet… since we’ll be going to europe early next year as well.

Lastly, Katie’s uncle and aunt – Chris and Ann – brought their baby (Max) home Friday.  He was born prematurely and was in the NICU for two weeks, but he’s a trooper.  He’s been able to gain weight and keep his temperature steady.  They brought him home and showed him off to the family on Friday, hosting a cookout.  It’s about time things started going their way.

BargainFiend.com is now live

BargainFiend.com is now up and running.  It may have been a little premature to release to the public, but I figure it won’t get any hits for a while…

I still need to add items to the menu, and add article content (which will take a long time to write), and come up with a better way of getting content on the site.  Right now I’m scouring the internet for posts and manually adding the good deals to the site.  It takes a good bit of time to get that done…

The other thing that I realized today is that I need an easy way of ‘expiring’ deals.  I need a css class and a method in wordpress that will let me mark a post/deal as expired and have it switch that post’s css class to expired.  I’ll get to those over the next few days.

Maybe I should have waited to release the site until these things were taken care of, but I was too anxious to get it up and started.  I hope everyone likes it… if not, let me know how I can improve it.  I’m not going to be sensitive about it… It was created in a weekend (thanks to the flexibility of wordpress) and could stand to be improved.

Almost finished with the design of Bargain Fiend

So, in my last post I talked about spending time doing web work on side projects.  Fortunately, the three day weekend has given me time to do just that.

I decided to start off by attempting to modify a WordPress installation to do what I wanted – show short summaries of “deals” on the front page.  Clicking each link should result in the display of the full details of the deal.  Those details include links to the product page, and any information about how to take advantage of the deal (coupon codes, Mail In Rebate amounts, etc.). 

So, three days after starting I’m almost there (the site is still on my local machine only, though).  I’ve styled the main page, made use of jquery to animate the show/hide action of the full deal details and am about to finish up styling the search and single column pages.  I also need to make sure there’s a place for ads – after all, the site is intended to be profitable.  Later, I’ll add some articles on finding the best deal in a number of different areas (travel, cars, cables, etc.). 

So, by the time all this is up and running, I should be able to just make a quick blog post on Bargain Fiend and have it appear as I want.  I’ll probably add forums later, and sign up for some affiliate programs once people start visiting the site more often.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I added a plugin that allows for