Link: http://AlwaysShopping.com

This is the site that started the collection of Always web sites. Back in 1998, AlwaysValerie was taking a break from the hot market for software development. The web was still in its infancy, but AlwaysValerie knew that being typecast as a C++ programmer was leaving her behind in the revolution that she had anticipated, but now seemed to have become too technical to be allowed to play at the higher level that she preferred (application development, particularly on the web).

Follow up:

AlwaysShopping was founded as a vehicle to learn web technologies -- starting with HTML and Javascript. In its first incarnation, it hosted a newsletter about online shopping, edited by AlwaysKate who scouted out the best online deals. This was of course when there were MANY great deals to be had because "giving things away" was thought to be the way to succeed in ecommerce.

Later, when Amazon introduced its web services API, AlwaysValerie developed Active Server Pages (ASP) to build content that was automatically displayed with related products.

Eventually, it was time to explore the selling side of ecommerce and AlwaysValerie, who dispises hacking, nevertheless hacked up the "Amazon code" to create a shopping cart system that worked on XML files and integrated with the PayPal Shopping Cart.

Of course, AlwaysValerie immediately started a rewrite, which included the "most cool," but sadly invisible, part of the site where the catalog data can be transformed via XSLT into other data formats for bulk loading products to be sold or advertised on other popular shopping sites like eBay, Froogle, Shopping.com, and Yahoo!

Work soon halted when AlwaysValerie accidently discovered LAMP and concluded that all past and future sites that she developed should be on this platform and leverage Open Source solutions, unless there was a compelling reason to recommend Microsoft Windows/ASP solutions. Since this time, further development AlwaysShopping has been "stuck" competing for attention with another legacy site and new intitiatives like AlwaysBlogging.