nadabid

The name is the product spec, because nada bid is a search over eBay that is restricted to items nobody has bid on yet.

The constraint was the idea, and the idea was a narrow one. Building a better search over everything would have meant competing with eBay itself, but searching only the slice where a buyer still had an advantage, where there was no bidding war and no momentum and the seller's reserve was still untested, was a small problem with an obvious customer attached to it.

The tagline under the wordmark says it plainly, and the tagline is this: Find the items that others have missed.

Built twice

2007, in PHP and JavaScript. Everything happened in the page and nothing waited on a full reload, and that was the whole reason I had started a consultancy around browser software in that year. Auction data suits that treatment, because what you are looking at changes while you are looking at it, and it keeps on changing. Results came back with the price on them, and the shipping, and the time remaining, and the time column ticked.

I pulled the DOM work out into matrixtable, which is a small library for building an HTML table that you can address as an N×M matrix. I wrote that library for several single-page applications of my own, back in the days when we just called it ajax.

2016, on Node. I rebuilt it 9 years later on Express and socket.io and EJS, and it was a full rewrite rather than a port. I spent that September on the search bar and on the mobile layout, which tells you what had changed in the intervening decade, because by then it had to work on a phone.

Where it went

The domain nadabid.com no longer resolves, and the 2016 rebuild is the version that is on GitHub, and that is all that is left of it.

It is the only thing I have built twice, a decade apart, and on entirely different stacks. I would like to say that this means the idea was a good one, and that I came back to it because it deserved to be come back to, but DialASermon suggests that I just have trouble letting things go.