Is there a good skill-swapping website?

September 19, 2005 4:04 AM

Can anybody recommend a good skill-bartering website? I'm a writer, and I've spent the past week tearing my hair out in an unsuccessful attempt to debug the website I'm putting up for my new humor book. I have a feeling that the remaining bugs are something a professional web designer could fix in a day. Meanwhile, there must be webdesigners out there who could use a writer's help in making their sites better written and/or funnier. Googling has turned up a ton of barter sites, but I don't know which (if any) are reputable and useful.

(By the way, I also found two discussions about a MeFi-centric swap site, but I couldn't find any evidence that it was ever implemented. )

posted by yankeefog to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

For your immediate problems, I'd guess just asking for help would suffice.
Do you need design, or code or both? People are always (over-)eager to help.
posted by NinjaPirate at 5:05 AM on September 19, 2005

I've seen people post things of this nature on craigslist. One was a mexican restaurant wanting to trade food for a site.
posted by meta87 at 5:15 AM on September 19, 2005

Post the address here and we'll take a look at it.
posted by planetkyoto at 5:58 AM on September 19, 2005

Normally, I would gladly point you (and everyone with skills) towards Blogbarter but thanks to the extreme busy-ness of the core folks who run the site and some php issues, we're offline until October 1. This is exactly the sort of thing we do, and have been doing for the last couple of years. Damn the timing!
posted by Dreama at 6:38 AM on September 19, 2005

Oh damn the typos, too. That's BlogBarter.
posted by Dreama at 6:40 AM on September 19, 2005

Without knowing the specifics of what's wrong (php,html, cms software... ?) I can't guarantee I can help but if you email me with details I can take a look and we can maybe work something out.
posted by dobbs at 1:34 PM on September 19, 2005

Ditto. I can probably help, depending what kind of problem it is. Post a bit more detail here?

Does anyone recommend Experts Exchange? I used to use it quite a lot but haven't been there for a while. It has the happy quality of putting you in touch with numerous techy types who compete to offer the best advice for points.

You get free points just for signing up, which you can then offer as a bounty for solving your problem.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 4:28 PM on September 19, 2005

Response by poster: Everybody, thanks for the advice and the offers of help.

Within moments of posting this, I heard from a MeFite who offered to swap his HTML skills for my writing skills, so this particular HTML problem looks like it is in the process of being solved.

But for future reference, I'm glad to know about Experts Exchange and BlogBarter. (By the way, it looks like the correct URL for Experts Exchange is http://www.experts-exchange.com/ -- I'm guessing they thought "expertsexchange.com" would be open to misinterpretation...)
posted by yankeefog at 12:38 AM on September 20, 2005