Cyprus-city second lifestep

In this week I added some functionality to one of my projects cyprus-city.com. As usually adding new functionality with rails is more easy than I thought before.

1. Now it has better caching, especially in CSS and JavaScript. Users can feel that pages are loading faster. You can test it watching this page.
2. I have rewrited import of homes from bestcyprushomes.com with Mechanize rails plug-in. As also it helped to add two more portals of searching new sell/buy homes' proposals. The only problem is that Mechanize cannot use Javascript for working with internet pages.
3. And final new feature is adding homes' import into cron-task, what means that new proposals will be added into cyprus-city.com automatically.
   

Hopefully in near future, I will add new portals with buy/selling proposals and not in near future redesign our page. This last task will do Irina Roost when she will have enough expierence;)

Freelance in continuing

It is very hard to get your first client as a freelancer. To make it easier I recommended to create your project and show it to the client. (It was a theority.)
But for now, I found one client in freelance page with showing my project and describing how I see their problem solution. And one of my two solution-seeings won the bid. The bid was to make some component/plugin for Joomla that helps client to find the nearest shop to him.
Firstly, client wanted to let me alone without money becouse I explained my plan too detalised (it was my mistake). But, customer was great and sent me a 20eur from which 7eur ate my home-bank :-D. Good eating, bank!
But in pair of days there become a miracle. The client had a problem and asked me to do or improve some component of Joomla. The problem was that script loaded all the shops and map becames too heavy and one city was like one red spot. My task became to create the script wich at first didn't load anything. When client inputs is address or zip-code script had to be able to find nearest shops and return 10 of them.
5 days ago I did this script and got my money (it was a little bit more than firstly I wanted). For now I will get, maybe ane more task to develop more futures to this script.
In conclusion, this is a small history how one small project helped me to get my first client, and to say more, satisfied client!!!

Yes, I did that

As I thought, when I was creating my cyprus-city.com project, I will study something. And for now, I almost have a client at eufreelancer.eu. And one another client is thinking about to buy the code of my application, which I mentiod in top of this message.
So, for every startupers or programmers who is thinking to become a freelancer, just create your project and start it, that every your future client could see your work. You will think, that for client that your project is not what client wants to see. But you could show client part of your project which shows solution of main client problem. If you do it in this case, client will see that your understand his problem an can solve it. Again, do some project and show it to clients as much as possible (by the way, you will get trafic to your page;))

OK, how to get content to your page

For first time it's hard to make a content of your page and make people to create it. The only solution is to parse data from other pages and save in your project. Like I wrote to some property-companies in Cyprus to use my project, no-one answered me for three days. So I will take information from them myself.

For doing that rails/ruby has some solutions. One of them is HPricot, I didn't like it because it was hard to work with. The next solution I'll try is Nokogiri to parse all the data. 

When I saw rails casts it seemed quite easy to save parsed data into rails project. In next some days I would like to make parsing into http://cyprus-city.com. That's cool, isn't it?

P.S. I have already did the model to parse data of property from another property-companies but they all only sell villas. No-one wants to make realtor job. So I, may be, give up with this project, I would like to see something more about Rails.

New project started

I know that I didn't write for a long time however I promised that. But there were two big reasons:

1. studding - it toked  almost my time
2. repairing of my new flat

And like I already wrote in title I started my new project - Cyprus City (http://cyprus-city.com).  The main point why I did this page is that there is no good web-page for finding homes or accommodation.  I know that because for now I'm studying in Cyprus Nicosia for this term.

The programming language of this project is Ruby on Rails, JavaScript framework is jQuery with some plugins. In next step I may-be do parsing from another property-agencies pages so http://cyprus-city.com could became main page for finding homes for buying and renting as well as to find business properties.