Life on the Road

A while back I posted about my dilema:  my lists at thethingsiwant.com were missing - in fact, the whole site was gone!

Since the out-of-state family and friends were getting anxious about birthday shopping for R.T. (March) and Jewel (May), I had to do something fast.

I was delighted to discover that Amazon has added a “Universal Wishlist” option, so that I can add things from other sites to their lists. 

I jumped right in, wracking my brain to think of things to put on the kids’ lists…  Boy, I sure wish I had “backed up” the lists from thethingsiwant (TTIW) or something!

Well, TTIW came back eventually.  So now I’m faced with a new dilema: 

Where to wish?!

They never did say what the problem was, how it was fixed, or why I should think it won’t happen again.  I feel quite comfortable with Amazon’s reliability.

But, as a wishlist goes, TTIW is still hands-down better than the competition.

With the Amazon lists, I don’t have as many fields to edit when adding items from Amazon itself (ironically).  If I want to set the priority, add a note, I have to click around to the wishlist itself and edit it.  With TTIW, the pop-up is the same for all items being added, and includes all the fields.

On Amazon, the list viewer has a lot of sorting options, which is certainly what I might prefer as someone viewing a list…  But most of the people viewing our lists are pretty non-computer-savvy folks, and I prefer the control I have as listmaker at TTIW, to set the order for displaying wishes, etc.

TTIW has a “header” for each list, where I can place a photo, and general information (kids clothing sizes, colo preferences, etc.).  Amazon has nothing like this, so sizes and such would have to be updated on each item listed.

Neither has a good backup option, which now sounds to me like a REALLY good idea!

As of this moment, I have wishlists for each family member (plus a “family wishes” list) at each of the two sites.  Some items overlap, but many are different.  The TTIW lists have a lot of cool stuff I’ve added as I ran across it over the last three years or so.  The Amazon lists have some other cool stuff I found while searching for categories of things I knew I ought to add for each person when starting fresh.

It’s going to be a hassle to combine, but obviously keeping two separate lists defeats the whole purpose of a “Universal” list simplifying things for the grandparents.

Which way should I go?