Last weekend, when our heat wasn’t working (again), I had an idea: What if there were a site where I could bitch about my landlord? Then, people who were about to sign a lease could check on this site and see if their would-be landlord sucks… before they sign that lease.
After confirming with the girlfriend marketing that this was actually a half-way decent idea, I started to get excited about it. A few short hours later and I had a decent mock-up.
Full disclosure: It’s at that point that we found ratemylandlord.com, sigh.
Though pretty deflating, it’s not exactly the same. In fact, that site’s kind of old and doesn’t have the super-cool jQuery-ness of mine. I’m thinking I could do things differently enough to at least warrant putting my site out there.
Personally, I like my UI a lot better.
Live!
I give you… Landlord Reviews Renters’ reality. As it is, you can leave a positive or negative review and search reviews by landlord name or partial address.
I’m making this post to ask for beta-testers. Go, make some fake reviews, play around with the search boxes. If you’re feeling motivated, report bugs to me via email or on github.
Todos and Known Bugs
I do have plans to make this epically useful. Any feature requests, just send ’em my way.
Here’s the current list I’ve been procrastinating on:
- Allow “discussion” on review pages
- More JSON APIs
- Maps
- Profit
And some things I already know I need to fix:
- If you skip a required form field (some browsers allow it), you get a nasty server error.
The Source
The site is written in haskell (what else) compiled to a fastcgi executable. All I have to do is scp it up to my slice and it just works.
A beautiful thing.
I use slicehost. They have an Arch image. They rock.
If you’re interested, you can view the source on my github; pull-requests always welcome.