Whenever I begin a new project I like to write a “mission statement” for the purpose of setting the scope of the project. Likewise, whenever I end a project, I like to document that as well. This posts marks the end of a project: LoveThyShelf.com. I registered LoveThyShelf.com back in 2011. The following is from my initial post on that site:
As a collector of many things, storing and displaying those things has been an issue for much of my life. Back when I was in mid-high, my parents owned and ran a small computer store. Shortly after the store permanently closed, some of the display shelves ended up in my bedroom. There I used them to display my various books and toys, and I can’t think of a time since then when I haven’t surrounded myself with shelves. Left to my own vices, I’d probably mount shelving units in every room.
Throughout the years I have met many fellow computer, video game, and collectible enthusiasts, all of which who have had to implement shelving in some form or another to display their collections.
LoveThyShelf.com’s mission statement is to (A) share pictures of functional, creative, and wonderful shelves; (B) share the stories behind those shelves; (C) share plans for building shelves. Note that I am not limiting the scope of the site to custom or homemade shelves; I am just as interested in sharing clean implementations of store-bought shelves as well.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, so what happened? First I’ll say that my love and appreciation of shelves has not diminished. I still love seeing unique shelves and seeing other people’s shelving and storage solutions, particularly custom or creative ones. Here’s what kept the site from growing:
01. I quickly found that my posts over “there” took away from my posts over “here” — with only so many hours in the day, it was rare that I would write and post an article for both sites. So while the site was new I was researching, drafting and writing several posts a week about shelves over there, but as the newness wore off I returned here for posting content.
02. I was really hoping more people would submit pictures of their shelves. I got less than half a dozen submission from people after asking publicly multiple times. A lot of people simply told me that they didn’t think anyone would want to see their shelves (I did!). For me, hearing and writing about other people’s shelves was my favorite part of the site, but unfortunately it never caught on. Without feature articles like those the website turned into “hey look at this picture of these shelves I found,” which got pretty old pretty quick.
03. The site never gathered any traction. While I am a big believer in focusing projects, this one might have been a little too focused.
The LoveThyShelf URL expores this week and I won’t be renewing it. All the posts from that site have been exported and imported here at robohara.com under the new “LoveThyShelf” WordPress category. I spent some time last night going through and updating all the picture links on those posts, so they should appear just like they did over there.
I actually kind of think that this will lead to more posts about shelves instead of less, as this solution will still allow me to occasionally post about new interesting shelves I find along the way.
I’ll miss it