About Orrery

It all started with a reading notebook my wife kept, which I automated for the two of us. That was BookTracker, now Orrery Books. Then people close to me started asking for the same treatment for whatever they were keeping by hand, and that is where Trips and Matchday came from, with a few others in the queue.

For a long time there was only BookTracker, and I barely touched it, because I honestly never expected anyone to find it. No marketing, no launch, nothing. Then earlier this year, while I was wrapping up its mobile app and building Trips, I actually looked, and it had just under four hundred people using it, a number that has since passed five hundred. That got me thinking this could be something more fun than three unrelated sites. Orrery is that idea: real names instead of generic ones, one identity, one account.

The endgame is a single app where you move between the members instead of hopping between sites, with one view of all of it over time. A sort of time capsule: the places you went, the books you read, the things you watched, the concerts and the matches you showed up for, and more I intend to roll out, all on one timeline built out of the habits you already track. Give it a couple of years and it should be a genuinely lovely thing to look back on. We are nowhere near that yet, but everything I build now is meant to hold it up.

For now, I hope you enjoy using them. And if there is something in your own life you wish you could keep track of, tell me. It might be the next one I build.

Murilo

The limits

One developer, one budget. I pay for what keeps this running and I am glad to, but some things do not scale without cost, so this moves at the pace I can manage in my free time. It is not a company and not a business. It is done carefully, and with a lot of care, but it is not fast.

I am not a designer. Everything is plain, and that is a conscious choice: with the hours I have I would rather ship another app or another feature than spend them trying to become something I am not. Maybe one day both.

Nothing is monetised, and there is no plan to change that. If it ever became necessary to keep the apps running, the only honest option I can picture is affiliate links on wishlist items in Books, discussed with users first and kept as quiet as possible. Advertising is not an option. To be clear, this is a contingency I can imagine, not a plan.

The apps that depend on outside services live inside call quotas, by the minute, hour, day and month. I cache hard and I removed search as you type to spend fewer calls, but spikes happen, and a search can be unavailable for a few hours. It has happened before.

Fair warning: you might find it a bit plain, or hit a search that is down for a while because it ran into an API limit, or run into some other rough edge. I work on this as often and as much as I can, so please bear with me. All I am really trying to do is make these apps a little better for everyone who uses them.