Englewood Edge - Englewood Florida's own online daily newspaper

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Posted Dec. 14th, 2009

Did you ever tell some­one you’d have some­thing done in a day or two because that’s what you hon­estly thought it’d take, and then two months later you’re still work­ing on the thing?

That’s been my life since about Octo­ber 26th. But now it’s done, and dar­ling, you’re soak­ing in it. Wel­come to Engle­wood Edge’s clas­si­fied system.

Here’s the skinny on the clas­si­fied sec­tion: I have tried to make it as friendly to the eyes and as use­ful as pos­si­ble. Engle­wood has long needed a sort of mar­ket­place hub for peo­ple to con­nect, and hasn’t really had a good one since, well, I don;t know when since. But there’s a per­sonal ele­ment in it for me. I want it to be use­ful. I want you to use it. I want it to facil­i­tate inter­ac­tion within the com­mu­nity. I’ve worked pretty hard to make it as easy to use as pos­si­ble. I hope you find it as such, and I hope you’ll tell all your friends how great it is. It will make all the lost sleep and sore butt worth­while if you do.

That said, there’s still a few fea­tures that haven’t made it off the draw­ing board yet. They’ll be imple­mented in the com­ing… um… months? I don’t like mak­ing time pre­dic­tions when my record for those pre­dic­tions is, uh, spotty. But they’re com­ing. Most of what remains undone is stuff only we Edge-folk see, so don’t sweat it too much. Keep a look­out for notes like this above the clas­si­fied menu to tell you when I’ve made changes that might effect your expe­ri­ence with the clas­si­fied section.

One thing I would like to men­tion is that our order forms are a bit, shall we say, numer­ous? I’d rather have one form that adapts to your inputs and crafts the clas­si­fied ad as you go, but just get­ting it set up at all was a bit of a mon­u­men­tal task. I hope to sim­plify the order­ing process in the future. You’ll find, if you’re post­ing mul­ti­ple ads at the same time, you’ll be re-entering much of the data over and over. Again, this can’t be helped at the moment, but if you’re look­ing to post more than 5 ads at a time, con­tact us, either by the con­tact form or by the Edge gen­eral phone num­ber — (941) 716‑1521 — and we’ll see if we can just get them done all at once through e-mail. Fewer than 5, please use the form. That’s what it’s there for.

All sen­si­tive data, such as credit card num­bers and so forth, are trans­mit­ted securely over an encrypted con­nec­tion and are not stored on our server. We’re using the same data encryp­tion the big finan­cial insti­tu­tions use. I just thought you should know that.

Like any­thing in the com­puter world, a new prod­uct like this is bound to have lit­tle glitches here and there that I haven’t antic­i­pated. So, if you see some­thing that doesn’t look right, let me know using the con­tact form. That comes to me directly, and though you may not get a reply from me, I will read it, and if I can find what you’re talk­ing about, I’ll fix it.

Lastly: Nor­mally we will post all the ads we receive in a day at 3 a.m. the fol­low­ing morn­ing. For the first few days, or weeks, depend­ing on how it goes, we’ll be post­ing them as soon as we can. This could mean your ad goes up 10 min­utes after we get the ad, it could mean it goes up 3 hours after. It depends on whether we’re busy with other tasks. This is just to get the clas­si­fied sec­tion pop­u­lated and use­ful as quickly as pos­si­ble at the beginning.

OK, one more thing: if you could also tell all your friends how cool a guy I am, that’d also make me smile.

(I promise it’s true)

Eric Chap­man

Engle­wood Edge Designer and Inter­net Wran­gler
(and part-time techno-zombie)

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