Merope
PlateThe archive. A photographic plate is a negative, so stars come out dark on pale stock — this is the thing an observer actually handled.Two ways of recording the same sky.SkyThe observation itself. The same stars, the way they looked before the glass.Two ways of recording the same sky.

makhzan

The hardware store Egypt does not have. One place to find what a project needs — wood, metal, electronics, springs, pipe — assembled from the shops that already sell it.

Egypt has no hardware store — not in the sense the phrase carries elsewhere, of one building you drive to knowing that whatever the project needs, from timber to terminal blocks, is somewhere inside it. What exists instead is specialists: a shop for springs, a shop for pipe, a shop for connectors, each very good at one aisle of a store that was never built. Finding a part means knowing which street sells it, then a phone call to learn whether anyone on that street has it today.

makhzan is that store, assembled from the shops that already exist. It reads what suppliers already publish, normalises it, and keeps it searchable in one place. It is a directory rather than a marketplace — no cart, no payment, no delivery. It tells you what exists and who has it, and then sends you to them.

Where it is

The store is the claim; a narrow slice is what can actually be proved. So V1 is electronics components in Greater Cairo, and the rest of the aisles come after the first one works. The ingestion spine is built and running: Shopify, WooCommerce and Odoo adapters behind a registry, resumable partition sweeps, around 11,800 real listings from live Cairo suppliers, and part-number aware search in both Arabic and English. There is a read-only API, a server-rendered bilingual frontend, and a production deploy that re-scrapes daily.

Still to come: canonicalising the same product across suppliers, a self-serve portal so a shop can claim its own listings, and a freshness policy that decays a price rather than pretending it is current.

Being a good guest

A crawler that costs a supplier anything is a crawler that has misunderstood the job — being listed is meant to send them buyers.

  • Public pages only. The catalogue endpoints a shop already serves to any visitor. No accounts, no logins, nothing behind authentication, and nothing about a supplier’s customers.
  • robots.txt is honoured, fetched per host and obeyed.
  • Crawl-delay is a floor, not a target. A site asking for twenty seconds gets twenty, and the default pause is already longer than most crawlers use.
  • One request at a time per shop, at least fifteen seconds apart, with a full pass over a catalogue spread across about a week rather than run in one burst.
  • The crawler says who it is in every request, and leaves an address to write to. Suppliers can ask us to slow down, change something, or stop.

The site is live and searchable in both languages. The code is not open yet.

Releases

Nothing released yet.