When a Perl programmer and a web content engineer are engaged to be married, geeky things are bound to happen...

Marla and I have been living together for years, so we don't need the typical items people register for when they get married (ie dishes, sheets, etc.) We had a hard time finding one store that has the random assortment of things we want to register for, and we found that most online centralized registry services are too restrictive as to what stores and items are available. (If someone can find what we want on sale for half off, why should we force them to buy it for full price at the only place it's available on one registry?)

So, the obvious (to us, anyway) solution was to build our own gift list tracking website. I was meaning to find an excuse to play with HTML::Mason anyway...

We put together a website using Perl, Apache, mod_perl, CGI, and HTML::Mason, with a Mysql (via DBI) backend. The administrative half of the site allows us to enter information about which items we are interested in, and links to or notes about stores that carry the appropriate items. The user side displays a list of gift suggestions, with quantities wanted, quantity already purchased by someone, and buttons to let people tell us they've bought one of the items.

For security (through obscurity) reasons, I'm not going to post the URL here. I Know There Are No Malicious Monks out there... but I wouldn't want any of those evil web-crawling spammers to go to our site and mark everything as "purchased," or something.

Disclaimer: We hate wedding registries too. But when given a choice between registering for gifts, or getting a lot of things we won't use in 5 years (let alone 20), we both prefer providing gift suggestions. Our goal is to maintain a gift suggestion list for the purposes of reducing waste (by reducing the probability we'll get something useless to us), not to promote excessive consumerism or to appear greedy.

Alan and Marla

Update: We have already developed this. It's only in "hobby" state, not anything worth distributing. Do people want to see source, or the web page itself? I could make it available if you're interested.

I'm not sure what the best way to post multi-page HTML::Mason scripts and Mysql table descriptions though... it seemed a bit excessive.

In reply to Geek registry by ferrency

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