About this site
Nifty started out in the autumn of 2007. At that time, facebook had recently released its platform for application developers, and the network was proliferating with thousands of new apps. I had already built one which delivered a random haiku to your profile, and was looking for a new hobby project. One of my friends suggested that they needed a good way to share gift ideas with friends, because there was nothing like it available on the network. After a few months of development (in my spare time), the facebook app called "iWish" was finished. Its subtitle was "a nifty wish list for facebook".
The FB app made it out only a few weeks before Christmas 2007; a little too late to reap the benefits of the holiday season. Even so, it caught on and attracted its first hundred users within a couple of weeks. A few months after its release, "iWish" was rebranded as "iWant" with a new logo and design by famous interface designer Joey Lomanto. In the year that followed, its popularity grew slowly, attracting a few new users per day. Development continued throughout 2008, with some new features added, including the "mall" (powered by Yahoo Shopping) and enhanced social features. By Christmas 2008, the app was being adopted at an alarming rate, items being added at a furious pace - sometimes several per second. The app was becoming so successful, it was overloading the server where it was hosted.
In the lull following "gift season" in early 2009, iWant underwent some technical enhancements to improve performance and handle the load of its popularity. At the same time, development began for the next generation of the app as a standalone web application for use outside of facebook. The domain "niftywishlist.com" was purchased in order to be the app's new home, and here it is.
2009 has been a huge year for enhancements at Nifty. The standalone website, integration with Twitter, registry options, updating the facebook app, the API, the developer's AJAX client library, plus hundreds of tiny invisible updates to the invisible back-end systems that keep it working smoothly. With traffic still accelerating, Nifty is on its way to being the web's premiere platform for keeping a wish list.
Ian Ring
Chair of Niftyness
2009
Info for geeks
Sometimes people ask what keeps Nifty running. here's the lowdown:
- Nifty is hosted on a LAMP VPS, using PHP and MySQL.
- The core program, DAL, API, MVC, all together weigh in at around 30,000 lines of code
- Interface Graphics were all created using nothing but an old version of PhotoShop
- No WYSIWYG tools were harmed (or used) in the development of Nifty. Every byte of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS were keyed in "from scratch" with a text editor. Developer's text editor of choice: "e"
- Nifty's JavaScript layer was bulit on a solid MooTools foundation.
- Uploaded images are handled using PHP's GD and Imagick libraries