Ok, it’s been far to long and the time has come. I have made reference to this several times, but am just now officially launching my new site: Find Low Book Prices.

I tell a bit of a version of this story on the site’s about page, but will share it with you all here as well. Around the beginning of this semester, I was looking online to find out how much money I could save by purchasing some of my textbooks online. As I was doing this, I had multiple windows open (one for each of a variety of different websites that sell books) and was entering the information for each book in each window. It was getting quite repetitive and annoying and I decided that there must be a better way to compare prices and decide where to purchase books from.

Thus, the idea came to me of a very simple, streamlined site without a lot of frills and/or extras where a user would be able to type in information about a book (the original idea was to just be able to search by ISBN) and be returned the cost of that book at various places such as Amazon.com, EBay, etc.

Well, as I began putting that site together, it seemed to keep growing and what I originally intended to be a small simple site now contains 34 PHP files and 2,533 lines of code. It doesn’t seem like much when I look at those numbers, but it sure took quite a bit of time to put it all together and make all of the parts work with each other. In retrospect, this was a great project because along with increasing my knowledge of PHP and CSS, I also learned about API’s and XML (both which I was basically scared of before) and creating/using cookies.

At any rate, I’m fairly happy with how it turned out and hope that all of you fine readers will help me promote my new site and get some traffic to it. If you would be interested in helping me promote this site, check out the Promote page where you can print off posters and business cards as well as retrieve the code to include the 125×125 banner on your site. Also, I have included some social media interaction on the site via Twitter and Facebook. Making use of the three social media buttons that I have included is also much appreciated.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone who assisted by giving me feedback during my pre-release party because I do feel that many of the suggestions that I received were quite helpful and that the site is much better because of it. If the site is not any better, at least I feel better about it and have more confidence in it.