101 Things To Do Before I Die

A while ago I picked up the book 101 Things To Do Before You Die by Richard Horne (illustrator for Harry Potter books, amongst other things). It's an great little gimmicky book, which, as the name would suggest, lists 101 things for you to do before you die, with a page for each where you can fill in details. The best gimmick is that at the back there's a page of star stickers, which you peel off and stick onto the pages as you do the things.

I bought the first book for my girlfriend, who loved it. But I thought it was so fun that I soon bought myself a copy. We both went through, filling in the bits that we've done. Fiona had alreadsy completed more than me, but I had part-done quite a few.

There's a decent website to go with the book, 101thingstodo.co.uk, which has a few supplementary materials (such as updates and maps), as well as a simple forum system.

I was so enthralled with the book that I thought it'd be fun to create a quick website chronicling my own individual efforts to complete the tasks. Of course, there's no such thing as 'quickly' creating a website, so, several weeks later, I can finally announce 'Frankie Roberto's 101 Things To Do Before I Die' [no longer online].

Seeing as how some of the things might take a lifetime to complete (especially 'Thing 100 - Reach 100 Years of Age'), I had to think about the design, structure, and URL-scheme of the website carefully. I settled on using thing#.xhtml for the page names, as the thing numbers are stable and I know I can support the .xhtml extention forever (hopefully XHTML will be around for a while). I'm using a single MySQL database table to store the data, and a combination of PHP, XML and XSLT to generate the static pages.

Most of the thing pages simply contain some comments on that task at the moment, but some have more details. In particular, Thing 36 illustrates which countries I've visited. Thing 98 details the Stop The War demonstration I went on, and is the first thing that I've completed. Things 52 and 57 detail which films and books I've seen and read from a list of the 'best ever'.

Comments or bug reports for the minisite are greatly received - I hope you enjoy reading it!