Foodgeeks, the End and the Beginning
On September 28th 2009, I ran into every website owner’s worst nightmare. That morning, the Foodgeeks.com website was operating erratically, and after performing diagnostics on the server it became apparent that most of the files that ran both Foodgeeks and Winegeeks had become corrupted.
Fortunately, the databases were still intact and unblemished, so all 10,000 recipes and 2,000 wine reviews were A-OK. Winegeeks was able to be restored to about 70% of its original capacity from a backup, but as for Foodgeeks, the backups were either invalid or too old to be worth restoring.
I spent most of September 28th through the 30th getting Foodgeeks back to a place where it could display recipes again, to ensure that it didn’t lose any of the Google juice it had built up over the years. After the bare necessities were taken care of, I had to pause for a moment of reflection and ask myself, “What now?”.
I created Foodgeeks shortly after selling the certification training site I had founded, Cram Session, back in December 1998. Just as Foodgeeks was starting to take-off the dot-com crash took place. All possible sources of funding and revenue quickly dried up, and I decided to put the project on the back burner.
After taking the next 4 years to earn degrees in English and Italian from The Ohio State University, I dug back into Foodgeeks, created an authentication system and re-wrote some of the technology running the site. I then founded Winegeeks with the help of Sunny Brown, and worked on those sites for a few months, but again wasn’t able to find a way to make either site take-off.
I moved to Portland shortly thereafter and got a real job working as a developer / project manager for OCP. I redesigned Winegeeks in my spare time in 2007, and before I could redesign Foodgeeks, the startup Shizzow began sucking up all of my free time. Through each of these adventures, I learned a lot about building web sites, and in particular about building websites the wrong way.
In the summer of 2009, I began consulting with Mozilla on rapid development projects, and I realized that I might finally know how to build websites the right way. And I realized that this was my chance to make up for the shoddy versions of Foodgeeks and Winegeeks that I’d built in the past.
35 days after the big crash, and with the gracious help of Crystal Beasely and her amazing design talents, Foodgeeks has been rebranded and relaunched in time for Thanksgiving. Foodgeeks includes most of its original features, as well as some new offerings, such as activity streams, badges, tags and the lovable Mr. Yummy. In my spare time, I’ll continue to crank out features for Foodgeeks, and will soon rebuild Winegeeks as well.
A few friends have asked me if Foodgeeks will be my new startup. To be honest, I think it’s way too soon to claim anything of the like. All I can really tell you right now is that it feels great to see my perpetual side project finally come into its own.
