The Website That Never Was
Expiring domain names make me sad. Those expiry emails are a constant reminder that I had an idea I didn't execute on (sometimes for the better). After my most recent expiry, I thought I'd take a trip through my expired domains and see what could have been.
scrapebook.org
I've toyed with the idea of deleting my Facebook account many times, but I'm always worried about losing the data I've contributed. I wrote a tool to pull that data from Facebook. I discontinued the project (which was only ever half done) once Facebook added the ability to download your data.
kandrandyou.org
After Daniel Ritchie passed, I setup a tumblr for people to submit photos of
themselves with The C Programming Language. 23 people submitted images.
While I let the domain expire, the tumblr is still up
adoptarepo.org
This one hurts. Adopt a Repo was going to the be the best place to find maintainers for your old, abandoned projects. It was going to look just like a pet adoption website, complete with funny commercials. You'd sign in with you Github account, identify your projects, and then the site would add a banner to the README announcing the search for a new maintainer. I still think there is a need for a solution to abandoned projects on Github.
areyouresponsive.com
Are You Responsive served as a developer tool for testing responsive websites.
It's still alive, but I let the name expire due to low usage and better
tools being built into browsers.
dothingstellpeople.com
After reading Carl Lange's great post Do Things, Tell People, I wanted to create a community based around people sharing their most recent creations and getting feedback. Imagine Hacker News but only Show HN posts. I decided against the idea because I didn't like the current state of online community software. I may reboot the idea using Discourse.
stockorshop.com
After my Apple products or stock post, I thought it would be fun to generalize the concept and do it for other products. Game consoles, laptops, cars, and maybe even soda. Decided that I didn't want to be a one trick pony.
anyonecancode.org
Inspired by Anyone Can Cook from Pixar's Ratatouille, Anyone Can Code was going to be a website for teaching beginners how to code. Never got past the idea phase.
castinghawk.com
A site for aspiring actors managing extras work. These actors are inundated with text messages and emails for extra work everyday, with few of these messages relevant. I built a prototype version, but never released it because it relied on email forwarding. I also wanted to use machine learning (via scikit) so that when a user flagged enough job offers, we could get an idea of what items they liked.
codingwithfriends.com
When Github launched their game jam, I wanted to make a crappy social game version of Github. You'd have to buy coins to open pull requests and create repos, and opening issues allowed you to level up as a developer.