About StarkVegas.com
In a word, Starkville. This website is focused on Starkville, Mississippi. Similar websites attempt to cover the entire country, but in the process do a poor job at the local level. I actively search for information about available apartments, condominiums, and other rental housing resulting in comprehensive listings.
Real Estate
In the summer of 1999, I was working in Florida and needed an apartment in Starkville to come back to. I naturally went to the Web expecting to have a variety of apartment listings to choose from. To my disappointment, I only found about a half dozen listings. I think there are many reasons most apartments are not listed including lack of funds, lack of technical expertise, and some simply see no benefit in listing. Regardless of the reasons, I knew that to make a website useful, it must be comprehensive and the only way to make that a reality was to actively collect and index the information. That's the principal idea behind this website.
Classifieds
The classified ads were how I learned to write web applications. I'm an engineer by education, so I had a bit of learning to do. I thought it was better than posting ads on bulletin boards around campus, so I built the classifieds and advertised it on those same bulletin boards. They were more popular than I expected at first and I had fun with them. I started getting spam type ads and took them down for some time and have just recently put them back up. They're free to use and don't require much work on my part.
Technology
I believe in using standards so the pages on this website are validated with tidy during development. I also try to make sure it renders correctly in different browsers including Safari, Firefox, Camino, Internet Explorer and Opera. I also test in Links and Lynx (text browsers) sometimes. If you have trouble with my website, please let me know. I think free software is a good thing, which is evident in my tool set which includes:
If there's something I haven't listed here that you'd like to know, please drop me a line. I hope you find my website useful. -Randall