the blog

Web shopping lists are the next step — and I've got proof that they work. My girlfriend's birthday is December 21, so I knew I had to buy her twice as many gifts. I started looking for her presents in October, and began saving links for all the gift ideas I was considering. On December 7 — nice and early — I scanned through the whole list and picked out the best presents — and then placed all the orders online. Now as long as the U.S. Postal Service doesn't let me down, she'll have a merry Christmas and a happy birthday!

And I didn't even have to look for a parking space...

Maybe in the next century, children won't understand this concept of a written Christmas list — and they won't even understand the concept of a crowded shopping mall. The requesting and purchasing of gifts may all happen online. And when that happens, some of those lists will probably be generated on a site like Xerpi.

It's already starting to happen. People really did use the web this year to get gifts under their tree. According to Forbes, this year online purchases of electronics went up an amazing 24% for the week after Thanksgiving.

I'm not the only one thinking about this. My first gift this year was a special Christmas issue of Archie comics digest, and it shows Santa building a web page to accept gift requests for the teenagers of Riverdale. {"Think of what a tremendous time-saver this idea can be" says a female elf.)

Jughead thinks it's a hacker playing a trick, but eventually he and Archie agree to give it a try.
It's all working splendidly until the female elf replaces all the video games Archie requested with instructions on how to play "spin the bottle."

"But those video games are what the boys want!"
"It's what the boys think they want..."

Jughead is still furious that Santa didn't bring him video games — but Archie is delighted. (And so is Big Ethel, who chases Jughead with the bottle...)

Maybe someday we'll even hear stories about Santa using Xerpi. Wait, wait, hear me out. It seems like tracking the deserving children of the world would require a site like Xerpi. After all, Santa has to...

• Make a list
  
• Check it twice
  
• Update "naughty" and "nice" statuses
  
• Keep track of who's awake...
  

I imagine him creating a series of tabs for each time zone, and then adding a block for each state on those tabs. (Actually, Santa might want a group of blocks for each state, so he could collate good children for each major metropolitan region.) Delivering all those gifts would still be a logistical nightmare, but each child's name could be linked to the gifts Santa's decided to bring them. (Or, for bad kids, what type of coal...)

Okay, Santa would have to have a pretty big Xerpi home page.

But at least then he could remember all of Jughead's video games.