Hello and Welcome!Some of you may wish to know what lies behind this web site in terms of personalities & technology. Firstly, there is only one personality involved and that's me. I run this site from my home in the industrial town of Vereeniging, south of Johannesburg. Surprised to find just a single lone ranger instead of an organisation of some sort or another? It's not altogether unusual these days to find similar scenarios behind a sizable portion of South Africa's web sites. Technology has changed radically over the last decade and there is an increasing trend to decentralize away from the town and cities. Any operation that can be achieved digitally, can be done equally as well from home as from any office block. In the same manner, you, the Internet savvy users, leverage this new technology to your best advantage by searching for ideal properties from the comfort of your homes. About Myself 46 years old single male who cannot understand how he landed in Vereeniging's slow lane after enjoying London's fast and furious for 23 years. I returned to South Africa a few years ago when family commitments curtailed my extended stay in the U.K. It was a joy to be back in this country again where the sun shines most of the time and the people are as warm as the weather. Vereeniging would not normally have been my first choice of settlement but it's not such a bad place, despite it's extremely depressed local economy. My love affair with the Internet began about four years ago and I only wish that it had come 30 years earlier. I taught myself web design and hoped it would be possible to enthuse local business with the wonders of the Internet. I'm a bit ahead of my time in that respect and I will have to wait a while before Vereeniging catches any kind of Net fever. I then ventured into e-commerce with high hopes of capturing a national audience. Sadly, this was not to be and I had to admit defeat and accept that certain models which work well overseas, do not necessarily figure equally here in South Africa. The recent property boom alerted me to how the Internet has revolutionized the way houses are being sold. I stumbled across a neat bit of software that I've adapted somewhat and hence the idea for the Property Shop was conceived. Do I know anything about property? The honest answer to that is, "no". I know enough about the technology to provide this site but I am not qualified to give any advice. The Technology The Property Shop is powered by Open Source server-side software from Open-Realty. Those of you not involved in the computer industry, may be unfamiliar with the Open Source movement but may possibly have heard of an operating system called Linux. Linux is an Open Source success story and is the flagship of a growing movement of software projects. The extraordinary thing about these programmes is that they have been written by software programmers in their free time and for no monetary reward. This is not proprietary software that we spend a small fortune purchasing in the shops. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The software can be downloaded for free and the source code is visible to anyone wishing to inspect it or tinker with it (hence the name - Open Source). Most of the Internet is powered by Open Source software, an example being the Apache web server which accounts for 70% of the WWW's traffic. The Property Shop is exclusively using Open Source software. The hosting is on servers powered by a MandrakeLinux operating system running Apache web server software. The backend uses a MySql database and the Open-Realty property listing scripts were all written in the PHP scripting language. All in all, if these pieces of software had been purchased from Microsoft, it would not be possible to provide a free listing service and the enormous costs involved would have been passed on to you, the consumer. I hope you enjoy the rest of your visit here at the Property Shop.
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