I have a crazy idea. It may even be a bad idea.

I’m going to try and bring Lists of Bests back from the dead.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the story. Back in early 2003, I had an idea for a website where you could keep track of books you’ve read, films you’ve seen, and albums you’ve listened to that happened to be on a list of greats (think The Academy Awards, the Pulitzer Prize list, etc). The result was Lists of Bests. It started out with maybe 10 lists, but over the years grew to over 30 lists of all kinds.

Then in 2006, I sold the domain and the site to the Robot Co-op group (old blog post), and they added a lot of neat features to the site and integrated it with their other properties. It was in good hands, and they kept it running for many years.

But at a certain point in the last decade, the Robot Co-op - and Lists of Bests - ceased to exist.

Now, flash forward to a few weeks ago when Namecheap had a sale on domain name registration, where .org sites were only a few dollars to register for a year. On a whim, I picked up listsofbests.org (the .com domain seems to have fallen into hands trying to make a buck), and thought I’d try and bring the site back up… in a way. I guess the big question is this: why?!

I think it will be a good chance to a) learn something new, and b) give me something to write about here on the weblog. There are still many unanswered questions about this endeavour, but I’m going to give it a decent attempt. I don’t think it will end up being a fully functional site at the level it was before, but it could end up as a neat proof of concept. We’ll have to see where it goes.

I’ll likely be sharing the code, and I’ll definitely keep track of progress here on the blog. But who knows what I’ll end up with in the end. It could be fun, right? Wish me luck.