I entered in my hometown and white oak as the search wood. What came up was a listing of companies supposedly in my area that I basically had never heard of before. I clicked on the first 5 companies listed websites and all 5 came back as not valid addresses.
how big will the universe be? The format is easy to navigate and use, so that's good. is there any gate keeping regarding who will be included on the list? Pardon, I haven't used woodfinder in the past as I buy oddball shite and from a local sawyer generally. Used to be two, but one retired. Bummer!
It's a demo loaded with 10,000+ fake suppliers for testing. I modified it to make that more obvious. Thanks!
Added later 16 min 07 s:
DavidW wrote:
how big will the universe be?
The goal is to include all wood suppliers within at least 2 parsecs of Earth to ensure we include Proxima Centauri.
Serious answer, it was seeded with 10K+ fake suppliers for testing. The current production version uses ZIP codes which limits it to the US. This uses a different method based on a database of over 200,000 cities around the world and their GPS coordinates. You enter the closest city in the db to you, and then it gets all suppliers with GPS coordinates within a "local" range, plus some more outside what I have defined as local.
All of this is free and open source, instead of using Google Maps API which they charge if you go over defined limits. And this method is actually far faster than using them, so yay. And it's not tracking you.
I’ve added a form where users can enter a wood type and click “Learn about it,” which directs them to The Wood Database. Replacing the current WoodFinder library with this resource might be a better option, as the site’s creator has done an exceptional job cataloging and describing nearly every known wood species. He supports the site by selling a hardcover edition of his book, so I’m sure he would welcome the additional traffic from our link.
In return, it could be mutually beneficial if he agreed to link back to WoodFinder, giving his audience an easy way to locate sources for the woods they research.
Question: Do you think this is worth pursuing as it is, or should we expand it into something larger—similar to our Marketplace, but not limited to just finding wood? In other words, a centralized, web-based marketplace for all things wood-related.
Many woodworking forums attempt this, and sites like Wood Barter specialize in it, but forums aren’t the most effective way to handle it. There are already excellent, well-developed platforms available that could serve this purpose far better.
We could migrate existing WoodFinder advertisers onto the new platform and redirect the WoodFinder domain to the section dedicated to buying and selling wood. Our Marketplace could do this. It's free open source software (OSClass) that has been around for over 20 years and still being maintained; however, there are better non-free options available if needed.
