Send Me Your Gifts

Project Overview

Send Me Your Gifts is a gift registry and wishlist platform I designed, built, and run myself. You create a wishlist for a birthday, wedding, holiday, or baby shower, share one link, and the people buying for you quietly mark off what they have claimed. Nobody needs an account to claim a gift, and you never see who claimed what, so the surprise survives.

The Challenge

The hard part of a registry is not the list, it is the claiming. Several people open the same shared link on the same evening, and two of them can decide to buy the same thing within seconds of each other. If the app handles that badly you get duplicate gifts, which is the exact problem the product exists to solve.

The second challenge was reach. A wishlist someone shares privately is invisible to search engines by design, so the site needed a genuinely public side worth crawling: a curated gift catalogue and real articles, built to be indexed, sitting alongside a private app that must not be.

My Role

Everything: product decisions, database design, backend, frontend, deployment, and the ongoing content work. Claims run inside a database transaction with row-level locking, so two people racing for the last item get one winner and one clear message rather than two identical parcels. Wishlists carry three visibility states, and the public and private queries are deliberately separate so an unlisted list can never surface in discovery.

Architecturally it is two frontends over one Laravel application. Everything public and crawlable is server-rendered for speed and search engines; everything behind a login is a Vue single-page app for responsiveness. Uploaded images are re-encoded through GD to strip metadata and payloads before they ever touch disk, and every mutating route is rate limited.

Key Features

• Shareable wishlists with public, unlisted, and private visibility
• Anonymous gift claiming with no account required for the claimer
• Concurrency-safe claim handling so two people cannot claim the same gift
• A dozen visual themes so a wedding list does not look like a baby shower
• Curated gift catalogue with affiliate links, categories, and detail pages
• Custom admin panel for gifts, articles, users, and moderation reports
• Bulk gift import from CSV, plus command-line tools that refresh product copy
• Hardened image uploads, report-and-review moderation, and per-route rate limiting
• Server-rendered public pages with structured data, sitemap, and article publishing
• GDPR cookie consent that loads analytics only after the visitor agrees
• Automated test suite covering the claim flow, admin access, and upload security