Sure, it's all been done before; but maybe Nick is more interested in gaining experience & learning something than just finding the quickest solution?

Many times, the effort involved in adapting someone else's ready-made, general-purpose wheel to your precise requirements ("porting" and "integration" in software terms) is no less than the the effort of doing it yourself, from scratch, in precisely the way you need it.
Plus you can end up with a better "fit" to your requirements, and a better understanding of the implementation.
On the other hand, of course, you could just make all the newbie mistakes and end up with a pile of junk - and have to buy-in a solution anyway!

I hope that was a suitably balanced argument... ;-)