Overall

[dnordstrom]

I'm not sure where to start—just stumbled upon this one, and was sad to see it so badly neglected. It seems like an active site with many pets and shelters listed. One featured pet arrived seven days ago according to the site.

The last update was two years ago—has the website just not had any contributors since then, or has it been abandoned and no more work will or should be done?

After one minute of browsing, these are a few of the things I noticed (listing them here since they are not in any way complete bug reports):

• Pets with no phone numbers attached (seemingly all of them) do not list the shelter—except for under the listing where it shows more pets from the same shelter. I would have to do a web search to find contact details.
• Many shelter pages give internal server errors.
• Zip code searches time out, resulting in an "Application Error."
• Intermittently, all pages return "Application Error."
• Concurrent page loads all seem to return "Application Error."
• (Perhaps implying a very underpowered server.)
• Oh, and the placeholder images sport a hyper-blue Comic Sans.

This goes for all the Hack For Change projects: there are no URLs to any websites. I had to look within public/index.html to find this one. EDIT: There are no descriptions either; one must go to the repo and check the README.

It's a shame since this site seems to have been well marketed, and seems to be in use by many shelters to help get these little (and big) ones adopted. Perhaps they're just placeholders, I don't know.

By the looks of it, it shouldn't take long to do a lightweight Node.js rewrite that runs steadily on a free Heroku or EC2 Micro instance, or qualifies for the Nodejitsu FOSS tier (or for space at Mr. Nordstrom's fancy, managed MediaTemple VPS—or unused (mt) Grid, but Node.js and Ruby are sadly unsupported). I'm quite sure some for-free design-power could be found as well, to paint one of those new flat UIs on it, effectively making it the coolest massively award-winning global pet adoption machine on the web.