Avoid duplicate Christmas gifts this year
posted | about 2 minutes to read
tags: gifting wishlist projects web development
Last year, my family and I ran into a Christmas gift issue for the first time; my grandfather ended up receiving 2 copies of the same book for Christmas from different people. Since we’re pretty spread out geographically and we tend to buy stuff from a lot of different sources, it was an understandable miscommunication. Still, I couldn’t help thinking there was a better way to handle it.
So this year, I decided to build a better way to handle giving gifts around the holiday season, and today I’m happy to announce the launch of a new small application to allow you and your group to more easily collaborate on gifts. It can be found here.
Once you sign up, you can create wishlists and add items to them. Then, you can invite other people (via email address) to view your list. After they sign up, they can “claim” gifts on your list - but this won’t be visible to you, only to other people you’ve authorized to view your list. That way, the surprise is preserved, but you still don’t have to deal with duplicate gifts. I’ve tried the system out with a few people and it seems like it’s going to work pretty well; there are still a couple things I’m going to finish up feature-wise, but as of today I consider it ready to use. Please give it a shot and let me know what you think - I’m super excited about it as a way to make Christmas gifting a little bit easier for everyone, and hope that you’ll find it useful.