End of an Era – WartVid

A Tech article with View Comments posted 1 July 2009.
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You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em… – Kenny Rogers

I’m shutting down WartVid. WartVid was a project to get the Wartburg Seminary community to save money on DVD rentals and Netflix subscriptions by listing each person’s collection online and making it easy to share. It had a lot of great accomplishments:

  • Over 1600 DVDs available, across a wide number of genres
  • More than 60 enrolled participants, representing nearly a third of Wartburg’s on-campus students and faculty
  • Written in fewer than 10 hours, total, by using the excellent Perl MVC framework Catalyst

Yet after the initial burst of enthusiasm, interest waned. I found that I didn’t even use it much myself, which is a bad sign for a hobby project. When the site starting turning up Internal Server Errors a few months ago, nobody even noticed, let alone complained.

So long, WartVid. It was fun, while it lasted.