Nairalist - Nigeria’s version of Craigslist
If you know what Craigslist has become in the world of classifieds, you’ll get an idea of what Nairalist would soon become, as it fills a need that Craigslist hasn’t seen. Now, never mind that Craigslist doesn’t list Nigerian classifieds on their site, since Nairalist Nigeria’s classified market.
Update: Seun just created a Nairalist’s Facebook page. You need to be a Facebook member to join.
Nairalist.com is a free local classified advertising service that supports the listing of personals, vacancies, cars, flats, products for sale & services in any of the 37 states of Nigeria. The site was built from the scratch using Python by Seun Osewa (the Nairaland Boss) and was launched on the 7th of January and has been featured once on Hacker News.
What are the features?
With Nairalist, Nairaland users can now post Jobs/Vacancies on Nairalist. Obviously, the Nairaland vacancy section has become so bad that one may not get useful information from their as was the case before. Seun’s plans is to close the Nairaland jobs section when Nairalist becomes full-blown.
The site has attracted those interested in dating, as the listings for dating in all states is more than listings for jobs, housing, cars, sales and services. I wonder why this is the case. The site also has a section for employers and advertisers overseas, which also features more of dating listings. Hmm…
What is unique about the service?
Unlike most web apps which are built with PHP and non-transactional MySQL tables, Nairalist runs on the Python programming language, and takes full advantage of Innodb transactional tables. Again, the site has been designed to be spam-resistant, which means that spammers don’t have any business on Nairalist.
The site had 1660 non-spam adverts and about 290,000 page views as at February 7. This means that within one month, it has proved that it could grow and become a leading classifieds site in the world.
What I like about Nairalist
Nairalist is very simple and usable. I guess it’s cos of Python’s scalability. I can bet it’s the fastest page-loading Nigerian website out there, which means that users of dial-up modems or slow ISPs would enjoy using the service.
One issue I have about the service is that, it doesn’t have a way to ensure that users post items in the right places, regions or states. For example, some classified adverts that were meant for specific states and listings have been posted elsewhere.
Is there a way to address this issue?
great idea, you must say but as i look at nairalist and other classified, i see nairalist is totally incomplete…
Thanks for the feature, Loy. Nairalist is my first self-written web app ever, so I’m really proud of it, and I think it’s the beginning of a wonderful adventure.
To answer your last question, I’ve been relying on user education to ensure that people post their ads in the right sections of the site. Where that fails, I have to resort to moderation. And if that proves to be insufficient, I’ll implement some AI technology for the purpose!
Nairalist, a first of it’s kind of online classified website. I’m very optimistic that it will soon be the best classified site to reckon with. It covers all the states and our fellow 9jas in the overseas who wish to be listed as well.
It’s success already. http://www.nairalist.com is sure a way to list your Dating, Jobs, Housing, Vehicles, sales, and services.
It’s working pretty well.
Andrew(Hubreality)
@loy
Are you a developer yourself, cos some assumptions you made here on transactional databases is highely flawed.
Innodb is a storage engine, just like MYISAM, and many mysql databases have tables stored using INNODB and that is so irrelevant to the language used to build the application that interacts with the databases.
You can bet that its the Fastest page-loading Nigerian website out there? you are surely a bad gambler. considering we have loads of Nigerian websites designed just using html, it wouldn’t hurt to do research on technical stuff before posting about them..
Nairaland is very addictive but in a fun and informative way.
A mighty big thank you to Seun! I know he hears this all the time, but I appreciate the fact that he takes the time to help. Not many people are willing to share their knowledge (and for free) - God Bless him.
I wish him the best of luck as he continues his ambitious journey to help Nigerians home and abroad.
Peace
yea, nairalist like its parent site i.e Nairaland is a very useful and and informative site, but as regards the isssue of wrong posting I think people would have to learn how to utilize the site, people should cuitivate the habit of reading the sections before posting. Personally i give it up to Seun he his doing a very nice job.
Suggest you spell out the URL (http://www.nairalist.com/). Hot-linked NAIRALIST.COM is OK, but most people may not know to click the link!http://www.nairalist.com/
Very very good job done by Seun
NIce…..i love the concept……Nice nice….
another hit from seun…..Waitin for more….
@Seun congratulations again on Nairalist.
@Loy, thanks for the post and getting the word out on Nairalist and other Nigerian startups. However, I just want to make a few corrections on your assumptions concerning performance and choice of programming language. I have known Seun for a number of years and he’s one programmer I respect. Seun does know how to juice every bit of performance from his applications. Little wonder the application is a high performer. This has nothing (as a matter of fact) to do with the programming language.
Scalability is not necessarily a function of the programming language but of server architecture. Facebook is a PHP application by the way and scales very well. It takes a programmer who understands scalability and knows how to improve the performance of his applications to build something similar to what Seun has done with Nairalist. It’s also important to note that Seun’s choice of a minimalist design to the website is also responsible for the speed of the application.
I do enjoy your blog posts but I will prefer a more objective approach to reviews.
@Kayode - Thanks for sharing your insights into web programming. See you around
@Tim - Thanks for your objective criticism. I appreciate your comments. It’s true that I mentioned scalability as a function of Python - it was guesswork as i havent used Python before:-)
Again, about my assumptions - Seun sent me details of the programming languages he used for Nairalist. I didn’t come up with those off the cuff. Perhaps, I need to do more research before posting the technical aspects - like Kayode suggested;-)
Nairalist appears very promising. I did a feature blog post about it and other naira dot-coms just a few days ago. I had no idea do also did a full post on Nairalist.
It is a good attempt and I commend Seun Osewa for his efforts. It takes some brain-power and lots of guts to do that and keep it rolling. I am more confident in our generation when I see people like Seun making waves online.
@ Loy, I assume you have learnt your lessons so I won’t comment on your mistake.
@Loy
Nice post irrespective of the “technical issues” pointed out by Kayode. I also appreciate the mature way you accepted Kayode’s criticism. I am proud the two of you have added to our knowledge in a practical way. Indeed Seun has done a good job, I am proud to be a Nigerian. It’s getting better online
@Seun
Cool site. Sure it’s fast, for now. Looks like we will have to start thinking of some serious strategy to penetrate the Nigerian market.
@Kayode and Tim
Good reading. Nice style. Happy you are taking these critics as a man. So no hard feelings on mine.
Thanks guys. I didn’t want to be the one to throw the first stone at some of the technical fallacies in this post.
@Loy
I am a fan. I have been reading your posts since post 1
What struck me most was the phrase:
“Nairalist is very simple and usable. I guess it’s cos of Python’s scalability.”
This statement implies that with scalability comes simplicity and usability.
Beyond what Kayode and Tim have mentioned above, I don’t see how scalability determines the usability of a site, not to mention its simplicity.
Scalability is the ability to support the required quality of service as the system load increases.
How does scalability then determine the usability of an online classifieds? How does it affect the user’s ability to view, post and reply to an ad?
How does scalability then determine the simplicity of an online classifieds? How does it make it easy for a user to find his way around the site?
One may say a slow site deteriorates usability. But then we are talking about performance here, not scalability.
Also, how can we be talking about scalability already with 290 000 pageviews? Serving 290 000 page views hardly stresses the types of servers we have these days.
Well there is the word “guess” in that statement. But I guess that “guess” was wrong
Cheers.
Fee from Kerawa.com
Looks promising. Guess I have to create a new slot in my Bookmark list. Keep it rolling Seun …….. best of luck
nice post. I’ve seen some other sites that have tried to solve this same problem but they don’t seem to be doing too well while at it. though i was a bit confused on the relationship between the language of choice and transactional model used. The speed at which the html is rendered on the site could be attributed to its minimalistic design. I enjoy your site. keep up the good work.
great site! but honestly i think it would have been just fine to use the MyISAM engine and just increase the memory limit MySQL can use. I don’t see the need for transactional support here. The most important thing is to be able to read fast from the tables and MyISAM db engine is one of the fastest around when it comes to querying large amounts of data. non-transactional database is also a lot faster than a transactional database in simple read write tasks. It would be more efficient to use a non-transactional database as you do away with the overheads required for enforcing transactions.
Seun,
Thanks for being a blessing to me and many others. I can not begin to enunciate how nairaland/list have enhanced my business
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@Deji: behind the scenes, a lot happens when you post. Without InnoDB, there’s a chance that some of those records will go out of sync. I hate db corruption.
Also, InnoDB can be faster than MyISAM if configured and used probably. Primary key lookups are lightning fast with InnoDB, and it handles concurrent access better.
@Kay, Tim: You’re right that the speed of Nairalist has nothing to do with Python. Python just made it possible for a rusty coder like me to deliver the site in record time.
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