LifeJot Web-based Shopping List Maker

Background

LifeJot started out, as many web projects do, as a hobby, something to "tinker" with.  Jason Cave of Ridgeline Media wanted a way for him and his wife to collaborate on shopping and other types of lists.  They both work and wanted something they could get to on the internet.  LifeJot lets a user enter whatever information they want so it can be used for literally any kind of list.

Jason started by building the first version on Microsoft's ASP.Net.  It worked well enough.  They were able to work together on shopping lists, gift lists, and Jason even used it to manage tasks at work.

There were always more features to be added and we had been getting into Ruby no Rails a little bit so we thought, why not make version 2 on Rails?

Getting Started

We started by making a list of all the features we wanted to add.  Since there were already over 1000 users of the website at the time, we had to consider their data and user experience as we brainstormed the changes we wanted to make.  We wanted to make the website easier to use and more manageable while maintaining as much of the existing data as we could.

We decided to build the project on Rails because we wanted to see what all the fuss was about and because, from what we'd seen, it would allow us to more quickly change and add things as we went.  ASP.Net works well enough but we were looking for productivity increases to allow us to do more in less time.

Let's Build It!

We set out to build it, starting from scratch since we were building version 2 on a completely different platform.  Within just a couple days we had already duplicated everything that the original system did. 

We spent the next few weeks adding new features and tweaking the user experience of the website to make it as easy and user-friendly as we could.  We also spent a fair amount of time migrating the existing user data, preserving as much of it as we could.

The Result

In just over a year LifeJot has gained thousands of users who have now created over 12,000 lists and will soon break 120,000 items entered.  LifeJot makes creating lists easy by offering a selection of common list categories to start with but every item is entered by the user.  This allows the maximum of flexibility for the user and allows them to tailor the list to whatever they need.

LifeJot is also used by the customers of several shopping and errand services who love the convenience and price (it's free) of the service.

We've had a few shopping service companies ask for tight integration or branded versions of LifeJot to use with their service.

Ruby on Rails allowed us to do what we wanted to the site and in an extremely short period of time. 

Visit LifeJot.com and setup your own shopping list. It's quick and easy!

LifeJot Home page

LifeJot Shopping Lists Page

LifeJot Single Shopping List