I had my first meeting with Alex, the other dude helping me with CampusExchange.

CampusExchange has always been a project I've wanted to pursue on the UNC campus; I really don't approve of how I only get about 1/8 of the total price of books during buyback season.

CampusExchange (which I'll shorten to CE from now on) helps facilitate local textbook transactions; it's not a 'true' internet company... we have no interest in reaching people in Boston or in Cali. We just care about the local market.

We're building, in essence, an online classifieds section for UNC students, but we're doing it in a very narrow way; every function will geared towads textbooks. Although we really don't have an interest yet in pursuing other areas (simple classifieds), I'm sure if the site proves popular enough, we'll do it.

Alex has a grade for this project; he is doing it for his advertising class project, so I know he's commited.

I've been pumping out code the past few days ... trying to work on building a good, solid foundation we can later expand on. There are small things that you always find out while programming. For example, how do you treat "wanted" ads?

My initial impression was to treat it just like a selling ad, but this seems a bit overreaching. For example, most students won't know what textbooks they want to use (unless we get that data). So I'll probably build a function just for the wanted ads.

The initial builds of CE were great, but we needed more. Convenience and usability are huge issues, and we were lacking in that last time. I learned a lot from the initial releases of CE... of which I'll hopefully fix up soon.

I'll write more on this as I progress further along the project.