About
OSUTrade* is a Craigslist-style market place for OSU students who intend to sell/buy books from fellow Buckeyes.
While there are many online market places for buying and selling books (e.g. Amazon.com, Half.com) and book stores on campus where you can buy or resell your books, they often charge you a commission or underpay you if you are re-selling the book. Even if you are just buying the books, you will often have to pay for shipping fees. OSUTrade is a free service that faciliates the exchanges of books between you and another student in a social and painless way.
The Backend: This website is originally a LAMPHP application that I wrote in one weekend. I have since rewrote it in Python and moved it to host on the Google App Engine platform. It's still in active development to better users' experiences. This website made use of a number of amazing Google APIs:
- Google Books API for search and displaying basic book information as well as preview of the book (if available).
- (The undocumented) Google AutoSuggest API for suggesting (possible) relevant queries as you type.
The Front End: OSUTrade uses jQuery to handle most of the DOM and AJAX magics, and to communicate with some of the Google APIs that speaks JSONP. This site used some icons from famfamfam.com's Silk icon set and a few from Komodo Media. I used the free Sketchetik Light font for the logo.
