Friday, February 29, 2008

The NEW Coffee Mug Heaven is up (kinda)

Coffee Mug Heaven was created in 1999 as a way for me to:
a) keep track of my mug collection
and
b) share my mugs with the world

The internet was a small cozy place back then and while the site had a few partnerships to make money off link/sales, making money was far from the primary purpose. For several years, Coffee Mug Heaven was the #1 "coffee mug" site on the web. I expanded the site to include other people's favorite mugs and unique mugs I found available for purchase on the web or on eBay. I maintained the site till late 2000 when the site was becoming so large that it was hard to add new mugs (due to the static design of the web pages). I set my mind to redesign the site using a database to serve up the mugs, thus making it easy to add mugs and keep the site humming. Life, being what it is, had different plans. Many things changed over the next 7 years and I tried to make time to do the redesign but made little progress. In my defense I didn't have the tools or know-how until the past few years.

This year, determined to make the redesign dream a reality, I worked hard to update the database I'd started, wrote the code for the pages and just today have (an ugly) working model of the NEW Coffee Mug Heaven up and running. There will be many updates and improvements over the next few weeks and my first goal is to have 1,000 mugs up on the site by April 1, 2008. That day will mark the 9th anniversary of the site's launch and will be the official grand re-opening of the site. But wait, there's more...

Once I've got the site all fixed up and running smoothly, I have another goal. By April 1, 2009, the site's 10th anniversary, I plan to have 1,000,000 mugs on Coffee Mug Heaven.

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