I am a recent university graduate-- B.S. in Computer Engineering. (and by recent, I mean Spring 2005).

• Reason 1: I wanted to create something that people would find useful and interesting.
• Reason 2: I wanted to supplement my income to help pay for student loans.
• Reason 3: I was bored and had some free time on my hands.

The purpose is to allow people to post personals and restrict who may view them by specifying certain characteristics at the time the post is created.

I guess. Craigslist encompasses much broader content. Sure, you could use Craigslist for personals among other things (cars, apartments, "escorts", etc). However, UpHook is ONLY for personals. And we have a more flexible search method (as opposed to searching for keywords in a post). Don't get me wrong, I mean no disrespect to Craigslist. In fact, I was inspired by their simplicity and efficient design. UpHook's email verification scheme was heavily based off of the Craigslist "publishing package" system. However, I put a large amount of effort in making sure UpHook offers something different in both user experience and functionality-- this is not a knock-off site.

UpHook is not a dating site. It is a free dating and personals service. And at the time of this writing, there is a distinct shortage of FREE personals sites. And an even smaller number of sites that DO NOT require you to register with a username/password. UpHook is not designed to suck you in and take all your money. It's FREE and easy to use-- something to visit every now and then and see who's looking for someone with your characteristics. And there is no filtering of post information. No "premium" membership. No BS.

I was inspired by the color scheme and thumbnail layout of Facebook. The fixed width thumbnails were a nice touch and help keep the site design looking clean-cut.

It's because of the ads that the site IS free. I'm not rich. And hosting costs money. The ads help displace the cost of keeping the site up and running. And like I mentioned before, I could really use some help in paying student loans.

The flag option allows you to report posts that you find inappropriate. This is mainly to help prevent spam posts, but it also includes posts that are in very poor taste. After reaching a certain threshold, flagged posts are not shown in searches and are marked to be personally reviewed by the site administrator (me). If it's kosher, I'll let it ride. If it's not, then it gets deleted. End of story. No un-deletes. No appeals. I worked hard on this site, and I will continue to work hard to make sure the quality of the site is maintained.

The refresh option lets you put your post higher in the search list. By default, posts are organized by refresh date (initialized by the date of the original post). When you refresh a post, you reset its date attribute to the current time, effectively putting it at the top of searches for which it will turn up. Posts that haven't been refreshed in over a month will be assumed to be dead and MAY be deleted.

Excessive refreshing will trip an alert to the administrator and will get your post deleted, deactivated, or permanently buried at the bottom of the searches.

No. This is done to prevent people from using UpHook to bounce spam to people. (i.e. someone changes the email to someone else's address, then send them messages to them through UpHook Messaging)

When you create a post, you must provide a valid email address. A verification message is sent to that email address with a link to a page that lets you activate your post. Once you activate the post, your email address is considered verified. When someone views your post and wishes to send you a message, they send the data to UpHook via the message form (link is automatically added to each post page). UpHook grabs your email address from our database and forwards the message directly to you. All emails will be from the UpHook domain, and your email address is NEVER exposed anywhere on the site.

Unfortunately, that's how the Internet works. People can always create a temporary email address to annoy people. Similarly, I anticipate some abuse of the UpHook messaging system. This is why all sent messages are marked with the IP address of the client who requested it. It's not much, but it's better than nothing.

If UpHook becomes more popular, I will naturally try to introduce improvements to the design and functionality to the best of my ability. I'm a geek-- I like coding.

I've stopped doing freelance design for a while. Instead, I am working on more side-projects. Keep an eye out for them. There's a good chance I'll mention them on the blog.

Sure. admin@uphook.com

You can send chocolate chip cookies too. They are my favorite.

Yo momma.