Table of Contents:

• Getting Started

  • General
  • Viewing Gifts
  • Adding Gifts
  • Deleting Gifts
  • Editing gift ideas for you

• Common questions & issues

  • NEW: How do I delete an Occasion? What if it's recurring?
  • I've bought a gift for someone. How do I mark their list of Gift Ideas so other people know not to buy them that?
  • I think I screwed up the table structure on my gift ideas - I can't see the Edit/Delete buttons anymore!
  • Is there a way to import (say) my Amazon.com wishlist?
  • How do I enter my own birthday?
  • What if I forget my password?
  • How do I change how my name is displayed?
  • [Person]'s birthday isn't showing up on my list of occasions!
  • Who will see the Occasions and Gifts I create?
  • Who can see whom I've put on my Watch List?
  • What URL do I give to people to see my Gift Ideas list?
  • How do I see what my list of Ideas will look like to other people?
  • How do I see what's changed on the site?

Getting Started

If you're not sure what GiftList is for, see What is GiftList?

GiftList is designed around the notion that you will only want to keep track of some of the people using the system. This is your "watch list" - the list of people that you're watching occasions and gifts for.

Click "Edit Watch List" in the leftnav to add people to your watchlist. Add people that you know + buy gifts for sometimes, such as on holidays or their birthday.

Once you've added some people, they'll show up on your homepage, as will occasions for those people. Your homepage also has a list of all the gifts you're getting, though this will be empty until you add one or more Gifts.

Viewing gifts for a Person or Occasion

You can click on the name of a Person or Occasion to see any gifts being bought for them by you and/or other people. Generally, any text that shows up as purple can be clicked upon to go look at that thing.

Adding a Gift

While looking at a Person you have a gift for (or an idea of what you're planning on getting them), click "Add Gift" next to the appropriate Occasion.

Or, while looking at an Occasion, click "Add Gift" next to the Person you're getting a gift for on that occasion.

You don't need to have actually gotten a gift to enter it into the system; when you add a gift, you can indicate whether this gift is what you're planning on getting the person, or what you've already gotten for the person.

Deleting a Gift

To delete a Gift you entered, Edit the gift (by clicking on the Edit button next to it), then click on Delete. There's no way to get it back once you've pressed "Delete", though you can always just re-enter it.

Editing gift ideas for you

Click "Edit Gift Ideas" on the leftnav. Click the "Add" button to add a new idea (which can be as long or as short as you like - though keeping each one of manageable length will make editing them a lot easier), or - once you have one or more ideas posted - "Edit" to edit one, or "Delete" to delete it.

It's called "gift ideas" rather than the more conventional "wishlist" because some people see "wishlist" as denoting a certain amount of pressure to buy them presents...as opposed to "gift ideas", which are posted purely for the convenience of their friends who may be racking their brains trying to come up with a good idea for a present.

Changing who can view your Gift Ideas

By default, anyone who knows the URL can see your Gift Ideas page. This allows you to send the URL to relatives or friends who don't have accounts on GiftList, and they'll be able to see what you're interested in.

If you'd prefer, you can restrict the viewing of your Ideas to logged-in users only. Edit your profile, and select "Make my Gift Ideas Protected", then Save.

Common questions/issues

How do I delete an Occasion? What if it's Recurring?

For non-recurring occasions: If you're the creator of an Occasion, and there are no Gifts for that Occasion, a "Delete" button will be present on the Occasion screen. Just click that. (If there are Gifts, you'll have to get in touch with the people who entered them and ask them to delete them.)

Recurring Occasions generate a new Occasion for each year - to delete the underlying Recurring Occasion, click on the small hyperlink "recurring occasion" that appears just under the title on any of the per-year generated occasion pages. This takes you to the page for the Recurring Occasion itself, where you can delete it. Deleting it will not affect already-generated per-year occasions.

I've bought a gift for someone. How do I mark that on their list of Gift Ideas so other people know not to buy them that?

You don't mark things on their list of Gift Ideas. You enter a Gift for them. Other people looking at the page for that Person or Occasion will see what you're getting, and can avoid duplicating.

(People do need to keep their Gift Ideas updated every once in a while; items bought long ago might not be noticed by others looking at more recent occasions. But, well, people ought to be updating every once in a while anyhow, unless they never buy anything for themselves...)

I think I screwed up the table structure on my gift ideas - I can't see the Edit/Delete buttons anymore!

Click on the "View ideas without HTML formatting" link at the upper-right of your ideas page - you'll then be able to edit or delete malformed Idea entries.

Is there a way to import (say) my Amazon.com wishlist?

There is no automated way, no. However, you can either just link to it from a Gift Ideas entry (good if your Amazon list is large) or select "View Source" on your amazon.com wishlist page, copy the relevant chunk of HTML that has all of your items in it, and paste it into a Gift Idea (which can take any HTML besides script tags).

If the hyperlinks are all relative rather than absolute, you'd need to insert the intermediate step of "paste HTML into text editor, and do search/replace":

  href="

  href="http://www.amazon.com/this/that/whatever/

or whatever is required to get the correct prefix inserted in there. If this step is required, and you do it successfully, let me know what the real prefix is so I can post it here.

How do I enter my own birthday?

You don't, since (a) you don't generally need to track gifts for yourself for your own birthday, and (b) if the site allowed you to target occasions at yourself, you'd have no way of knowing if they were set up properly since you can't see occasions that are for you.

You enter other people's birthdays that you're planning on getting gifts for. If another active user of the site is planning on getting you something for your birthday, they'll enter it as an occasion. (Which you then won't see.)

What if I forget my password?

While I'd like to eventually implement an email-based solution for that, it doesn't exist yet. Sorry. :\

Get in touch with whomever created your account. They ought to have the privs to reset your password to something of your choosing. If you can't reach them, but know who created their account, admin privs do inherit upwards, too.

If you can't reach anyone in your user creation chain, do Contact Me!

How do I change how my name is displayed?

At the moment, you can't, other than talking to me. This is because it would get very confusing if, say, one person changed their name to someone else's nickname.

Eventually, I would like to add support for fully editable nicknames, which would be displayed along with the Full Name.

[Person]'s birthday isn't showing up on my list of occasions!

1. You don't have that person on your watch list. Click "Edit Watch List" in the leftnav and add that person.

2. Their birthday is outside of your viewing date-range. Occasions that are far in the future or some distance in the past don't show up on your homepage anymore - otherwise, it would quickly become cluttered to the point of unusability. The # of days you see in each direction can be edited by selecting Edit Profile on the leftnav.

   In addition, if you click on the person's name, there will be a link at the bottom of the Person page that gives you the option to view *all* occasions and gifts for that person, ignoring your viewing range.

3. Nobody has entered that person's birthday as an occasion yet, or whomever did so set it up as a private occasion that only they could see. Either enter the occasion yourself, or have someone else do so.

Who will see the Occasions and Gifts I create?

Occasions:

An Occasion will show up on someone's home page if one or more of the recipients are on their watch list, assuming they have permission to see it:

• If you specify that an Occasion is private, only you will have permission to view it. This overrides all other rules.
• Occasions for a single person are viewable by everyone except that person.
• Occasions for multiple people can be secret or not. If it is secret, none of the recipients can see the occasion. If it is not secret, any of the recipients can see the occasion itself - but not that they're one of the recipients. (They'll see all of the *other* recipients listed, but not themself.)

Gifts:

Gifts show up on the pages viewing the Person or Occasion it's for(*), if the viewer has permission to see the Gift:

• If you have specified that a Gift is private, only you will be able to see its existence. This overrides all other rules.
• You can make a gift restricted, at which point a select-box will appear, allowing you to choose one or more users from whom to hide the gift (in addition to the recipient, from whom it is automatically hidden, and anyone who can't see the Occasion in question, from whom it is also automatically hidden). That way, if you're (say) giving the same or very similar gifts to a handful of people, you can hide those gifts from that handful but not from everyone else.
• Otherwise, anyone (except the person the gift is being given to!) who can see the Occasion that the gifts is for can also see the gift. For most situtations, where an Occasion is just for one person, this will mean that "anyone except the recipient of the gift can see it"...but if you have (say) a secret Occasion for 3 people, none of them will be able to see any gifts for that Occasion, regardless of who they're for (since they presumably don't know about the Occasion at all).

(*) = When viewing a Person's page, the gifts you see are screened by the number of days you've chosen to look-ahead/look-back for Occasions, as set in your profile. You can override this by clicking the link at the bottom of the page in order to see all gifts relevant to this person, ever.

See also the site Privacy Policy.

Who can see whom I've put on my Watch List?

Nobody can, including most site admins, the person who made your account, etc. While people might - might - be able to speculate based on who you do + don't enter gifts for, there is currently no web-based way for any user other than yourself to see it.

As mentioned in the Privacy Policy, I might see it while poking around the database during development.

What URL do I give to people to see my Gift Ideas list?

The same one you use to edit your Gift ideas. Right-click (or control-click, for Mac users) on the "Edit Gift Ideas" tab in the leftnav and select "Copy Link Location" or "Copy URL to Clipboard" or somesuch. When you paste it, it will look something like:

  http://www.wiremaze.net/util/gifts/profile/ideas.jsp?userid=[N]

How do I see what my list of Ideas will look like to other people?

It's pretty much identical to what you see when editing, minus the row with the Edit/Delete buttons at the bottom of each entry - but if you really want to check it out, just copy the URL you're at when you edit, log out, and then go to that URL.

This assumes that your ideas list is accessible to non-logged-in users (the default).

How do I see what has changed on the site?

If you're curious whether a particular feature has been implemented yet, or something's behaving differently than it used to and you want to make sure it's intentional, you can look at the site Change Log.