Gary Chapman, the author of “The Five Love Languages”, describes five ways in which people often feel loved.  Ashley and I have both read this book, and love languages often come up in discussion when we’re talking about friends, colleagues, or family.  Love in the sense that Gary discusses is often romantic love, but can also be any sense of worth one person receives from another.  To that degree, these love languages can be used to describe how children feel love from their parents or siblings and how friends feel love from each other, just as it can be for describing romantic love.

The five love languages are:

• Quality Time
• Acts of Service
• Words of Affirmation
• Physical Touch
• Gift Giving

Interestingly, gift giving is a love language of many people.  What gets really mysterious about love languages is that you may have love languages that are different than the one to whom you are trying to show love.  I’ll use Ashley and I as an example.  My love languages are words of affirmation, then a second-place tie for acts of service and physical touch.  Ashley’s are first and foremost physical touch, then gift giving and acts of service.

SO MANY PEOPLE MESS THIS PART UP! If you want to show someone your care for them, do not give them what you would like to receive, but what you know they want to receive.  It sounds obvious when stated like this, but most of us really mess this part up by doing what naturally comes to us when we think of doing something loving for another.  The natural thing to do, we think, is the golden rule–to treat others how we’d like to be treated.  This is close, but not correct.

The gotcha in all of this is that you have to know the other person well enough to discover what their love languages are.  That in itself is loving–the discovery of the inherent worth of another, exactly as they are.

So this is how Registree can help out.  If you have a loved one who happens to rate fairly high on the gift giving love language, then knowing what they would like to receive makes a much larger impact in their sense of your care for them.  Sometimes it’s easy to assume that gift registries are impersonal, but if the person took enough time and energy to add items to their Registree list, then it’s a pretty good chance that they would like to receive it.

And if your loved one does not rate as high for gift giving as they do in other areas, then consider other ways in which to show them love.  If your sphere of loved-ones just really don’t get a lot out of receiving gifts, then that’s fine, but do find out what they do get a lot out of, and shower them with it.

Lastly, if you yourself rate high for gift giving as the way you feel loved, then be sure to let your loved ones know this.  It’s not shameful or bad to open yourself up to your loved ones by saying “You know, I really like it when you buy me little things.”  Helping others to know how you receive love pays dividends for life.  Ash and I are a testament to that.

We often joke about those terrible sweaters you used to get when you were a kid.  It might have come from a grandparent or some distant relative that really didn’t know your tastes that well or what you were interested in.  ”Getting a sweater” is our codeword for getting a gift that probably was given with the best of intentions, but completely missed the mark.

At The Registree, Ashley and I have been doing some serious brainstorming about the issues surrounding gift giving in western culture.  Some see gift registries as nothing more than a formal way of declaring your greed.  Others see it as consumerism at its worst, where toys get bought for children over the holidays, they play with them for a week, and then get thrown out three months later.  Or even worse, the child likes playing with the box the toy came in more than the toy itself.  It can get absurd at its extreme.

So Ashley and I will be blogging a bit more about what it means to be a thoughtful gift giver, as well as a thoughtful gift receiver.  When I say thoughtful, I mean thoughtful in the sense that you put thought and care into how the gift will be used, as well as how the gift will be received.  Not as in “aww, that was so thoughtful of you Grandma”.  It’s our goal with The Registree to create a simple app that allows you to be more thoughtful in both what you give and what you receive.  And there are some really creative ways to keep the consumerism and greed to a minium that normally stigmatizes gift giving.

In some upcoming posts we’ll talk about the love language of gift giving, non-monetary gifts, handmade/homemade/diy gifts, and suggestions for how to be a responsible (and quite frankly, fun) gift receiver.  We look forward to your comments as well, so be sure to let us know what you think!

Block Printing Kit-Urban Outfitters $58
Book-Printing by Hand $18
Dress-Seamstress Christy Berry for Wiksten

Singer Sewing Machine-Urban Outfitters $299
Book-Bend the Rules Sewing$15
Apron-by Flapper Girl on Etsy $38

Screenprinting Kit-Urban Outfitters$64
Plain basic t-shirt-American Apparel $16
YouTube Video Tutorial (6 mins.)- FREE
T-shirt-No Wire Hangers $24

Another year, another dilemma. You made dinner last year, gave her a cheezy book of ‘love certificates’ the year before. Seriously? Any Joe on the street could have done that without knowing a single thing about your woman. You, know all sorts of things about her. This year, it is time to go handmade–because she is one of a kind–and only you would know just how rad she is. A gift card from Victoria’s Secret probably won’t do the trick. I hate to break it to you guys (she secretly wants you to go with her to Victoria’s Secret-and not just on the one Holiday where you are practically required to…well, you know). Save that field trip for an unexpected stray from the usual—say, 4th of July.

Clockwise from upper left:
1. Spice Chunky NeckWarmer $55 Cozy and fresh-chunky knits are all the craze, and she’ll be able to wear it through Spring as well= Bonus points for practicality.
2. Peacock Tattoo Tights $23 Now these are for you. You always hoped that her edgy side would come out more often. She always hoped she could show it, without permanently scarring her skin. This is what we call a good return on investment.
3. Owl Tall Pouch Her iphone needs a cute, cozy place to rest too. She pays attention to those details. She will appreciate that you understand how that is–seeing as you guys can be pretty uptight about your gadgets.
4. Vintage Sunglasses $48 Ooh aren’t these so 1960′s? She will look like your Big Screen Doll in these. Vintage will automatically make her think nostalgic thoughts about when you first started dating. And that is probably a good start to an evening celebrating love.
5. New Classic Black Denim Bag $55
This bag seems practical, but it has a touch of Audrey Hepburn. Plus, saddle bags are so in–they might never go out. Every girl wants that sort of class and grace. Why not be the one to give it to her? I’m sure she will reward you later.

Clockwise from upper left:
1.CamelBak Chill Jacket -$12 Dual-purpose. Keeps your coffee hot and your sports drink cool.
2.Novatel mifi-Price varies. Personal hot-spot. There are multiple carriers who charge a monthly fee.
3.Favorite Director Coasters- $48 (set of 4) Whether he loves the Coen Brothers or Spike Lee, he will dig the fact that you know what he likes. Regardless of how many times you refuse to watch There Will Be Blood.
4. Scratch and Scroll Mouse Pad-$9.95 Toss the post-it notes. Now you can write on your mouse pad and erase all of the evidence.

Peace out, more on the ladies tomorrow. Love, Ashley

We’ve embraced the social revolution and have joined up on Twitter and Facebook.  We’ll be honest, at first we weren’t sure why we should do this, but once we realized how well this helps us get closer to the actual users of Registree, we were all for it.  If you’d like to follow us on Twitter, you can follow us at @theregistree.

We also have a Facebook page as well.  Come become a Fan!

Here are the URLs:

http://twitter.com/theregistree

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Registree/190675996711

We hope to see you there!

This year we have some nifty new features that will hopefully make using Registree a lot simpler.  So without further adieu!

• New Bookmarklet: The new Bookmarklet feature lets you add any items from any website to your Registree list in a jiffy.  We’re excited about this one because one of the most tedious parts of using The Registree was adding new items to your list.  It used to mean dragging images to your desktop, remembering pricing and URLs, and generally a slow process.  Now with the Bookmarklet, you just leave it handy in your bookmark bar and whenever you see something neat online, click the Bookmarklet and it’s added like that.
• Get Satisfaction support: We like to know what you, the user, thinks about Registree.  So much so, that we decided to create an account with the great folks over at Get Satisfaction.  You’ll see a handy green “Feedback” tab off to the left of each Registree page now.  If you find a bug, have an idea for a better experience, or just want to say “hey”, simply click on the Feedback tab and leave us feedback.  We monitor each and every piece of feedback we receive, and often we’ll respond directly to the request or suggestion.

Overall, we wish to make The Registree among the easiest, fastest, and most enjoyable sites that you use.  Please do let us know how you like the new features, and we’ll be sure to respond in kind.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Eric & Ashley

Some cool new features released today!

• We made the concept of the shopping list much more important to the site now.  It has replaced the Invite tab at the top.  Now you can easily see who you’ve reserved or bought gifts for, and your running total.  A quick and easy way to see how you’re doing with your budget, and to make sure you haven’t forgotten anyone!
• We overhauled the way you invite others to view your list.  In the past, you would have to know a person’s e-mail address to invite them.  We made the system smarter, so now you can type in a name or an e-mail address.  If the name you type in is found in our database as a member who is already registered, their name will pop up in a small window.  Simply select their name and click Invite and off the invitation goes.  No more hunting for your best friend’s e-mail address in your cell phone.
• Now if you try to remove a person from your contact list, a confirmation dialog will pop up asking if you’re sure.  We had a member accidentally delete her son, so that part of the site definitely needed a little bit of care and feeding to make it more user-friendly.  It’s much better now, and the son is happy he won’t be permanently removed from his mom’s list anymore!

We also had various bugfixes and layout corrections.  IE 7 and Safari now show the buttons correctly within the view list page, and we optimized some of the old HTML code.

For those of you geeks out there, we also started down the path towards continuous integration, using a mix of PHPUnit, XDebug’s code coverage analysis, and phpUnderControl.  We’re very excited about this because it allows us as a very small team to turn around code and features extremely quickly with minimal breakage or bugs.  Woo for agility!

We’ve been so busy working on features of Registree, that it took a little downtime over the weekend for Ashley and I to realize we should have a blog tied to the site.  We talk about ideas, usability decisions, question reasoning behind colors, layout, and so many other things, why not discuss them publicly and get some input from our users themselves.  Also, it helps us to connect with you!  We like you, and we want you to be able to see how we click as we develop this niche web app for you and your family and friends.

In the spirit of keeping the front page of Registree clean and neat, we also want to use this blog for news items, new updates and features, and a forum for comments and/or suggestions.  We don’t require registration on the blog in order to comment, but to start off, all comments will be moderated–just until we see how bad the comment spam gets, then we’ll see if we can turn it off.

So welcome, and Happy Holidays to you all!
Eric & Ashley