Blog . Eli Duke . Com

i was a web designer in a previous life. that life ended about a year and a half ago when i decided that i’d had enough. i was spending too much time on the computer and i needed a break. i ended all previous engagements: i moved my friend’s blogs i was hosting to wordpress.com, gave ListYourList to shane, and wiped my hands clean. sure, i still checked email and uploaded pictures to flickr, but i wasn’t spending hours and hours each day doing that.

fast-forward about 6 months: ListYourList was still online and available for “pointless list-making”, but nothing new had been accomplished since shane took over and we were getting a shit load of spam comments. i talked things over with shane and we decided that there had to be someone out there in the world who was just dying to get their hands on a pet project like this and would get things moving on it. i posted a few notices on craigslist and found a guy in chicago who sounded really excited and qualified. i passed off everything to him (domain, code base, db dump) and wiped my hands clean yet again.

fast-forward about 6 months: i hadn’t heard from my chicago guy in months and the site wasn’t even online in it’s original form anymore because it was still “under construction.” i tried to meet up with the guy in chicago when i went back home this past summer, but he didn’t return my emails. hmmm…

so the site sat around for about 4 or 5 months with no activity and no progress, and i was getting pretty close to completely giving up on the whole deal. then, just last week, i got an email from kirsty taylor.

Dear Eli,

I was just procrastinating online, and I was distressed to find that listyourlist.com seems to have died a death. My good friend Rosa sent me a link to this blog, and I saw that you have disengaged yourself from it entirely. Rosa and I want to resurrect listyourlist, but to do so, we would need to be able to access the site as administrators; the domain name doesn’t register as available, therefore I presume that you must still hold the reigns in some form.

When I first discovered the absence of listyourlist, I looked for a substitute (aided by Rosa). It appears that listyourlist was unique in the un-gimmicky function it offered to people (emphasis added), and in the way that lists were completely independent, and attached to the user only.

Would you be willing to pass control to us?

We are two 2nd year Sixth Form students (that’s final year of High School), studying at Christ’s Hospital School in Surrey (England), and would welcome both the challenge (and indeed, diversion) of administrating the website.

Please do get in contact, with either of us.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this matter!

Yours faithfully,

Kirsty Taylor and Rosa Blaus.

wow! i was stunned. i literally couldn’t believe what i was reading. i didn’t know who kristy was, but i definitely remembered rosa from the early days of listyourlist. she stumbled upon it somehow and really latched on. we emailed back and forth about it for a while and she seemed like a really cool (nerdy) girl.

in the same email checking session in which i received the above email i also got CC’ed on an email that shane sent to rosa and kirsty. apparently they had emailed him as well (not know we knew each other) because he was still listed as the administrator for the “listyourlist.com” domain. remember, we completely relinquished control of the everything involved (domain, code base, db dump) over to chicago guy like 6 months ago. why was shane still listed as the administrator? turns out that the guy didn’t really do anything, so shane was able to just hand everything over to rosa and kirsty.

who knows when the site will be live again, but this time i think it’s in good hands.