Well like all good 20% projects this soon grew to consume most of my free time and much of my waking thought. Getting into the nuts and bolts of javascript has been great fun (dealing with the vagaries of PHP less so...) I've learnt a load of new stuff from dealing with cross browser annoyance in JS, to the benefits of being object orientated on the server side, to setting cache headers and mod-rewrite on Apache. My code is far from beautiful, but for now it works (mostly).
So, what did I build? Well I followed some advice I picked up a while back and tried to solve a problem that was close to home. Wish lists. Our friends and family use wish lists at birthdays and Christmas to let each other know what we want. The big problem though was that someone needed to be assigned to manage each person's list so that no-one ended up duplicating gifts. We used a massive array of tools to make this easier over the years (from paper to online spreadsheets), but never found the killer app.
Well that's not true, it turns out that Amazon had the killer app, almost. Just as long as you were happy for everything on your list to come from them. Unfortunately they don't stock original paintings from my favorite artist, so I decided to build a little app that replaces the Amazon wishlist with one that works where you want it to not one that works where Amazon wants it to. And now I'm keen for a small number of users to come and help me test what I've built and make it better. So what do you get? Well, we're still pretty deep in alpha so the feature set is a bit limited, but I promise a steady stream of upgrades and improvements, that said, I think I've met the original brief...
- Create lots of different lists, publish them to friends and family who can mark items as bought or bagsy them for a few days, or keep them private just for you
- Add stuff to your lists from any website while you surf the web using the magic bookmarklet
- Add stuff while you're on the go by text message or IM using Twitter
- Import your existing Amazon wishlist
- Add notes to each of your items so that friends and family know the exact spec you want
- Search amazon Books, Music and DVDs from right inside glisty
Some future plans:
- Let users mark their own items as bought (might finish this tonight if I make the time :-))
- Expiry dates for wish lists after which time items will be visible as bought to the user
- Amazon sync - let glisty stay on top of any new items you add to your Amazon wish list
- Collaborative list creation
- Gift suggestions based on other users lists (those last two are a bit further off!)
So if that sounds interesting, then go to www.glisty.com and use the following invite code ABLOG0529 (20 invites only) to have a play. I need lots of feedback and user requests so remember to send lots of feedback via my feedback group too.