About Development

I’m proud to introduce hydroharbor.com. This felt like writing a novel in algebra, and I’m anticipating at least another 3 months of edits. It would be enormously validating if this website went on to become a huge success. However, even if I move on to do other things, it gives me a strong sense of accomplishment.

HydroHarbor.com is clean, efficient, requires little maintenance, and could run forever. There’s a sense of pride in listening to the hum of an engine that you have been working on for a long time. Sometimes you sell that car for less than you put into it, but that doesn’t remove the satisfaction of knowing it works.

HydroHarbor.com is an organic website, developed specifically for urban gardening retail. All open-sourced and original content. You can define your own standards for organic, but my focus has been to build a resource that is sustainable (opensource), with virtually no overhead, that can be expanded and maintained with even a little revenue. The content of the website is the local, real experience of gardeners here in Arizona. We welcome content from contributors and sponsor an affiliate program.

We don’t use any facebook plugins on our main website. This is because we take our privacy policy seriously, and even an unclicked facebook like button recovers the IP address of the vistor, the page URL, and the date to the millisecond. This is not important to most people, but a few people appreciate it. Our blog, however, is fully integrated with social plug-ins as well as our youtube channel.

The advantage hydroharbor.com has is that it carries no subscription to expensive licensed software because all of the code is original or opensource. The majority of online retailers pay monthly for software that manages their inventory and transactions for them. We manage the entire directory we use for the website, and can recover and launch the website and data anytime if we ever needed to.

This website could not have been possible without the help of my brother Nate, an expert on hydroponics, and the participation of local retailers.

I appreciate any feedback, especially critical feedback!