Dave,
I agree: "incremental deployment" is almost always a good idea compared to a masive 'all-feaqtures Go Live". There's a classic quote, something like:
"Any large system that works at all, was once a small system that worked excellently."
>> I do believe one of the biggest challenges is keeping the information fresh, and not outdated.
Agreed! Like the database, it's a collaborative effort. And there's always a temptation for the users to abuse the intent of the design, e.g. using a Trade List as a Wish List, or as an Inventory, or vice-vice-versa.
If you adopt the 'expiring listings' idea, it would be a nice frill if the notification TreeMail had a button for "this is still available, so refresh the listing for N months and delete this Treemail".
Or if you adopt the "this seed was listed on mm/dd/yyyy" field, it would be great to be able to search for listings fresher than a certain date, or sort the hits by date listed.
>> should the person with avalable plants also specify a shipping season?
>> Such as check boxes for Available Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter?
Here's another frill: include a "Trade Reminder" field. Someone agrees to take some cuttings or send some bare-roots plant "in the right seaqson". Let them copy the ship-to address and terms of the trade and reminder date into a memo field, and then automatically send them both a TreeMail when the date is reached.
Lee Anne said:
>> My wish is for the list to match up. For example...I list a Hoya for trade the system could automatically show me a list of people that are looking for it. On the flip side, if I list a plant as "want" it would show me a list of who has it.
I think the DG feature like that is workable (or would be, if listings were accurate and up-to-date). Clik on a plant name, and see buttons for:
- these people Want that plant
- these people Have that Plamnt (and offer it for trade, maybe)
- these vendors said they Sell that plant
In the past, I was frustrated by the fact that I had some things that some people wanted, but OTHER people had things that I wanted. Seldom were both true at the same time of the same people.
(Now I tend to get most of my seeds from the Hog Wild swap, where basically everyone wallows in everyone's trough, you send out one box with 100 baggies of seed in it with 20 people's names on them, and you stagger home with more seeds than you can plant.)
BUT, for an insanely unworkable frill-idea, how about a cascading search?
- Person A wants Plant P1 from Person B.
- (Person A has nothing B wants, so no trade there.)
- But Person B wants 27 different things, and 300 people HAVE some of those things ... but B has nothing any of them want.
- (Still no trade.)
- BUT, several buildings full of servers running day and night, cross-checking all 300 of those WANT lists against Person A's HAVE list might turn up a three-way swap:
- - - - A sends Plant P2 to Person #171,
- - - - so Person 271 will send Plant #27 to Person B,
- - - - so she'll send Plant P1 to A.
Actually it's more like infinite regression or Combinatorial Heck: the Have lists of everyone who Wants anything from anyone I Want anything from ... or something like that. N x M x X comparisons where all of those are very large numbers.
Impractical in many ways, I think, but until Dave starts charging for silly ideas, I'll keep thinking of them.
I think the PRACTICAL way to trade is much more low-tech and humane: sending people things for postage or free, because other people send you things for postage. Or free.
That works!
