I run a free class reunion site. It’s a lot like Classmates, except it’s free and there’s no ads. I originally wrote it for my 10th reunion for high school, and being the wild and crazy programmer that I am, I designed it to be hugely scalable from the beginning. Anybody can sign up any school, any number of reunions per school, etc. I never thought I’d compete with Classmates, but I figured a few schools might adopt it and sign up. I just put it up online, let Google find it, and figured I’d reevaluate it after a year.

The domain-expiration email just came in, and it’ll cost me around $15 to renew it for another year. The domain gets around 200 page views per month and a few people have registered, but nobody’s using it for their primary class reunion planning site. I feel like it’s time to put up or shut up: either I put 40-60 hours into this thing to make it more robust, or I let the domain expire.

In comparison, this site (BrentOzar.com) usually gets more hits in a day than the reunion site gets in a month. I’d rather put the 40 hours into this site and add a good turtle forum or something like that. The vast majority of my viewers come to view the turtle section, which strikes me as ironic since I no longer have turtles! (We’ll probably get a box turtle when we move into the new house, though.)

So it’s time for the reunion site to say goodbye. I hate abandoning work – I’ve built a few sites over the years and then abandoned them when I didn’t have the time to make them great. The lesson, I guess, is to do few things and do them very well. People don’t come to the internet for applications: they come for information. The reunion was an application that took me maybe a month to build, whereas the turtle info pages took maybe two hours.

Would I produce sites & pages differently if the visitor numbers didn’t matter? Yes, definitely. When I sit down at the computer to build pages in my spare time, it’s either driven by giving something back to the public, or expressing something. (This blog is all about expressing what’s going on – I doubt anybody reads this closely. And if you’ve gotten this far, go surf somewhere more fun.)