The death of a website for packrats – KeepOrToss.org

On April 7, 2010, the first dynamic PHP site I built completely from the ground up, KeepOrToss.org, will cease to exist.

The website was inspired by two friends after helping them move and realizing that they needed a little push to get rid of the junk in their lives that was following them, untouched, from house to house. Packrats and hoarding are even coming into public mainstream with new television shows, but KeepOrToss never really caught on enough to support itself as a community. It did however function very well in giving me a wealth of practice and testing for later website redesigns and other personal sites, such as NovelRank.

As a learning experience it was really successful for 2 years, but as a sustainable website, it failed. Like any good entrepreneur, I learned, I loved, and I let it go when it couldn’t return the favor.  I’m much happier with my latest venture and the thriving community of authors over on NovelRank, so there is always that. Thanks KeepOrToss, and enjoy your life at archive.org.

NovelRank.com

After a few months of work and over 150 hours, I’ve completed a new personal website called NovelRank. The purpose? For authors to track their Amazon Sales Rank and the number of books sold.

The site was built off of an open source web-design base and then improved and adapted to the needs of the client: Me, in this case. While it uses the very popular jQuery library for some fancy web 2.0 interactions, the entire site is built off of PHP from the ground up. This build included a lot of unique work that is designed for unknown visitors to add content as well as get back results in familiar formats, include RSS Feeds, website widgets, and CSV spreadsheet downloads. This is greatly different from LRECO because the users interacting with the website were all employees updating content such as apartment information, images, and cities.
Work will continue on NovelRank with more features coming online in the future. Who knows what website will be next; Maybe yours!

Littleton Real Estate Company (lreco.com)

This gallery of images will start with some samples from the new website (2 images), then the previous version of the website (7 images).

The website is now live and available at www.lreco.com

Tags: littleton, lreco, management, properties, property, property management, real estate, redesign, website