I came across a news feed that apartmentratings.com had accidentally displayed their source code on their homepage, so I ventured over to take a look. I have never visited the site before and unfortunately by the time mozilla loaded the page they had fixed the error. Darn.
Seeing as apartmentratings.com serves a similar audience to my startup property management software website I decided to have a further look. I did a search for Buffalo, NY and the above picture was my search results...
I was quite disappointed to see that their sql developer does not know how to write a proper sql query. Somehow his query had populated search results with one record being populated 10 times, in no respectable order either. To make matters worse, is this site has no 'beta' stamp on it giving it some leniency for errors and it is covered in ads... slightly destructive to the websites appeal.
In my opinion, the vision behind apartmentratings.com had merit, until they decided to execute it poorly.
Chris
Monday, March 17, 2008
Review: ApartmentRatings.com Should Find a New Developer
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hi Chris,
I'm a co-founder of ApartmentRatings.com and saw your post this weekend. Wanted to address the errors you noticed.
To give a little context, we pushed a major release to the site this weekend, the Discussions tab, which enables renters to post questions about apartment communities and get responses back from residents. It's pretty cool and it's already starting to take off.
Anyway, the first problem that Dave @ Rentvine spotted with our source code being displayed, happened during the deployment of Discussions. It turned out to be a mod_deflate/mod_caucho conflict in our Apache configuration. Apache suddenly started serving up JSP pages directly instead of detecting that they needed to be handled by the app server. The issue was only visible on one of our servers. Rackspace was great about helping me isolate and solve the problem.
Thanks for spotting the second problem. We pushed a fix last night that should take care of it. It turns out that our Lucene search engine index was accumulating copies of the same apartments, which is why you saw duplicates in the search results. Thankfully, it wasn't a SQL error.
Anyway, wanted to give you a heads up on why the issues happened and make sure you knew they'd been resolved.
-Jeremy @ ApartmentRatings.com
Post a Comment