Starting Churlie

The idea of Churlie started back in March 2018. That’s when I registered the domain name. But actually it started earlier. I was talking often with Ine about an idea I had to manage portfolios of websites. I was responsible for some 50 websites professionally and another dozen for me personally. Ine had something similar, she had worked as a freelancer on dozens of websites, for some of which she was still responsible for the hosting / content updates. How to keep track of all these?

Maybe you know the situation:

“hey Peter, our website xyz.com has to be updated.”

“Wait, we have a website xyz.com?”

“Yes, it was registered by John, who’s no longer here, for a marketing project back in 2014 or maybe even before that. No idea where it’s hosted.”

Wouldn’t it be cool, that instead you could log in to your website portfolio manager, and see:

• xyz.com was registered on 13 Dec 2013 at Godaddy (US)
• hosting is done on a VPS at Gandi.net (France)
• there are 2 people who were in charge of it: John (who has left) and Mary (who is still there)
• we actually have 2 subdomains that we use too:
  • subscribe.xyz.com, which redirects to Mailchimp
  • admin.xyz.com, for managing the content
• the website uses an old version of Jquery

It’s not uptime monitoring, it’s not project management, it’s not CRM. It’s something different, that I call website portfolio management.

I started worked on it at several times since then, but I always got stuck on some aspect. in 2021, I decided to push through and develop the MVP.

The name ‘Churlie’

The name Churlie comes from ‘checking URLs’. It also might be inspired by the following quote from Airplane.

via GIPHY