I launched a new site over the weekend – Customizer Corner. It’s a search engine for custom action figure and diorama parts. I needed something like this for myself and figured others could use it too. I launched it by posting it in ~6 of the action figure groups I’m a member of on Facebook. The response was overwhelmingly positive which is amazing.

My original plan was to write the “data gathering code” and put it in a WordPress site as a POC. Once I saw it worked, I was going to write a backend from scratch. But… the more I used WordPress the more I saw it can get me to about 90% of what I wanted. It has faceted searching and the ability to search in tags. So I changed my mind and figured I’d just use WordPress. Now I’m finding some shortcomings and I’m rethinking that… I’m still not 100% happy with the searching… searching for two words doesn’t work like I want and some of the ideas I have for the site just don’t fit well into WordPress, so I’m looking to see if there is a site framework I can easily use. If not, I guess I’ll write it from scratch.

I talked with Neil at Red Flare Models and he is an enthusiastic backer of the site and idea. I also talked to Brian at https://customsforthekid.blogspot.com/ and he is totally on board too. Cool stuff.