January last year I was asking round my friends if someone would
be interested in having a few games of Tennis so I could get back
into playing, but alas not one was interested! So I hunted around
and found the only way I was going to find someone local would be
to join a club which a) I just didn't have the time to go all the
time on a certain day and b) would cost me quite a bit of
money.
So I had the idea of building a site where I could find a Tennis
partner, I then saw the bigger picture and started mapping out a
site that you could find another player for any sport or
activity! Well soon after I fired up Visual Studio and jumped
straight in... Shit... After about a week I realised how much
work would be involved to make it work, as the search had to be
good, site easy to use and most important needed to be a mini
social network to make people want to come back! [more]
Now at the time I looked round and no one was really doing it
how I envisioned it, I just thought I have to do this.. So I
bought my URL, mapped out the site in a bit more detail and rewrote
what I had originally started. It took me a heck of A LOT
longer than anticipated as I work for myself I had to do paid work
and in between keep building and tweaking, but last week I finally
finished version 1 of the site! I give you PlayerFind
The site is built in ASP.NET C# 3.5 and runs of a SQL 2005
database, it has been a fantastic learning curve building it as I
learnt so much ASP.NET along the way and also found the
ASP.NET Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library which I didn't know
about.
If you register on PlayerFind you can create new clubs which
other people on PlayerFind can become a member of, also you can add
Events which you can TAG the club with and people can register as
attending the event. Obviously what's a social network
without the ability to upload photos, so you can upload photos into
photo albums which people can comment on and you can TAG the photos
with clubs AND events so your images show on the club or events
main PlayerFind page (These are just a few things).
The site is ONLY targeted at UK people as I
just wasn't interested in trying to create a worldwide version, and
I wanted to try and keep it fairly small - To try and cater the
site to everyone in the UK I also researched as many disabled
sports as I could find and added those, as some if the sports (Like
wheelchair basketball) are becoming very popular over here.
Anyway... To be honest, I'm just glad for once in my life I
actually completed the first version of one of my ideas!
Usually they just sit on paper or get the DB designed and then get
left.