Ugh, what a week...
I spent a good portion of the weekend working on my new project. Actually, it's an older project idea, but I'm finally getting around to it. It's a gift registry.
"But there are so many of these on the internet already," you say. "Why would you just reinvent the wheel?"
Well, there are a few reasons. First, I don't know if you've used any of those internet gift registries, but they all kind of suck. If they look nice, then they've been cobbled together by some kind of HTML hack and offer no substance. And if they attempt to offer any substance they're fundamentally broken in some way and look visually unappealing.
So on Friday evening I set out on this task to create a complete, good-looking gift registry. First, I stopped by Template Monster to find a web site template that looked good for a gift registry. This task is harder than you think. Most web site templates are geared for setting up a store, not a gift registry. Nonetheless, I found one that looked like it would work.
But it didn't.
So I had to try again. I finally settled on one that seems to be working well. I switched all of my old pages over to it on Saturday, and things were off and running.
I wanted to add the basic features first, then get into some of my more impressive custom features. The basic features let you create a wish list for yourself. With the list entered online, others can visit the site, search for you and add you as a friend. You can view the list of any person in your list of friends and mark the gifts in their list as reserved for purchase. Even though you've marked it as reserved, they can't see this status when they're looking at their own list. This is really the whole point of having a gift registry. But my gift registry isn't going to be a plain old registry.
There are going to be extra features a-plenty. One of the major differences between my registry and the others out there is that you can suggest gifts for another person. Suggested gifts don't show up when a person is looking at his own list. If you know that Joe likes scary movies and the Exorcist is being released in a new Platinum DVD edition with 45 minutes of extra footage, you might like to add that gift to his list as a suggestion. You can use this feature either to suggest it to other who view his list, or you can mark it as reserved yourself to keep anyone else from getting it for him.
One thing I plan to implment before this is all done is the ability to add "phantom" users to the system. My grandmother does not use a computer, but she is the hardest person on my list to buy for. If I create a list for her in the registry, I and others who know better what she might like can add gift suggestions. If she eventually warms upt to the web, she would be able to attach to the account that we created for her. This would also be useful for a child who can't write/type yet, like Abby.
Another thing that is sorely lacking from most gift registries is the ability to create gift circles. You know them better as the Secret Santa method of gift-giving, not to be confused with Polyanna gift-giving (more on that in a moment). Basically, someone would create a gift circle, including a register-by date and a spending limit, and tells others that it's there. They would log in and join the circle. When the circle's register-by date arrives, the registry randomly assigns everyone a person for whom they will obtain a gift. They can get suggestions for these gifts from the registry.
I was looking up what exactly a Pollyanna is, and it turns out (as I suspected) that it's a movie based on a book by Eleanor H. Porter. In the story Pollyanna is a girl who sees the good side of everything. This relates to the Pollanna gift-giving style, where everyone buys a gift in a certain price range and wraps it. All of the gifts are put on a table without name tags. People go to the table and randomly choose one gift to take home, seeing the best in whatever it happens to be.
Pollyanna is popular at office Christmas parties when combined with this game (the name of which I can't remember) where you are allowed to either select a gift at random from the table or "steal" a gift that has already been taken and unwrapped. A person who had their gift stolen has the option to steal someone else's gift (people who have had their gift stolen are immune to theft for a round) or select a new one from the table.
Anyway, my registry does Secret Santa, not Pollyanna, because it would make no sense to use a registry for Pollyanna.
I'll have some other sneaky business going on in the background, too. I'm going to use Amazon's API to put listings on the page to popular items that relate to the ones in the current list. So if someone has a bunch of Tom Clancy books in his list, there will be a list of additional Tom Clancy books off to the side that might also be of interest.
I'm also going to try to have the registry use the Amazon API to suck a person's Amazon wishlist into their gift registry. That way, if you've taken the time to use the Amazon Wish List, you won't have to repeat your effort at all.
I plan on offering the list of registered items as an RSS feed that can be embedded in a web site. This will let people manage their lists on my registry, but post them for display on their own sites. Neat.
I have some other ideas, but I don't want to give too much away to my competitors this early in the production. Notice that I have not mentioned the URL for the site, since it's not quite done yet. When it is ready for use, I will post the URL here and I hope everyone who needs it will use it.
