Question

I’m new to coding in general, and I’m wanting to build a website that is a local only clone of craigslist functionality. It will not look like or pretend to be craigslist. I live in an area where Craigslist functionality is not accessible, due to a combination of gov’t web filters, and limited page support from craigslist. (One city, in one state in a 7 state union, and that city is not the largest, most populous or most central to the area.)

I’m partly looking at this as a project to teach myself to code. I’m not sure what the best technologies to begin a project like this are, and I’m looking for some input. Particularly, I’m looking to have a user produced classified ad accessible from the main web page and an RSS, sortable by city and category. I will need to filter inappropriate or illegal posts before they hit the feed. The public morality here is far stricter than in many western countries, so the need to filter is as much driven by user necessity as gov’t filtering.

Please feel free to be as broad or as specific as you feel is needed.

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

• first: plan which platform you will use,
  wndows, unix, VMS, etc
• Second: plan on the program which
  will host the web site
• third: plan where to host the web
  site, remote or local hosting
• fourth: find user groups in your area
  which meet two out of three of the
  preceeding steps
• fifth: join that group and become
  actively involved
• sixth: decide if your plan is
  workable if not start over at first
• seventh: ask a member of the group to
  adopt you as your mentor
• eighth: do what the mentor suggests

Morality, or the control of the content, is a business rule. Write a set of commandments which the site must follow and implement them into the code you develop under the leadership of your mentor.