For the notes people send after the cake
The good message arrives at eleven at night, underneath a joke about the cake, and is gone by Monday. A wishes page keeps what people wrote attached to the day it describes.
Chats hold logistics well and feelings badly. Nobody scrolls back through four hundred messages for the paragraph an old school friend wrote about a party in 1974, and the birthday person certainly cannot, because they were not in the chat.
A wishes page is the small deliberate change that fixes this. It sits on the event, opens before the day, keeps collecting after it, and gives you a decision over what appears. The notes have an address.
Put one of these in the invitation and the wall reads differently.
Tell us about the first party you remember, and who made it happen.
One story involving Marta, a boat, and 2014. Please include the part everyone laughs about.
What we hope for Ines, in one sentence, so she can read them when she is taller.
Say something kind about Tom. He will pretend not to have read it, and he will read it.
Grandchildren write, the old friends write longer, and the family reads them in order rather than reconstructing a chat log at midnight.
The guest of honour produces no record of her own day, so the wall is what you keep for her instead.
Notes arrive quietly, which suits an age that will not write anything in front of other people. They are read later, privately, and they matter then.
Somebody who cannot make the flight still leaves a message, and a livestream link on the same page puts them in the room for the toast.
Moderate means you see it first. A guest writes, the note waits, and it appears on the wall when you approve it. That is the whole mechanism, and it is the difference between a page your family can read for years and a comment box that somebody regrets.
It is also why the wall suits a birthday and a wedding equally well, and why it is not a general feed. There is no reply thread, no ordering by popularity, and nobody else's inbox involved. It is one page about one day, and the notes stay where they belong.
How it works
Open a birthday event in the web app or ask Jitabi to draft one, then make sure the wishes section is turned on before you publish. A draft is private, so you can shape the page first.
The invitation goes out with the wall already open, and one of the sample prompts above written into the message. People who cannot come still get something to do.
Read each one before it appears. That takes a minute a day, and it means the wall is what you want your relatives to find.
On the day, open the wall in front of whoever you are celebrating. Afterwards the notes stay with the invitation, where anybody in the family can read them again.
Questions
Yes, and they should. The wall is on the event page from the moment you publish it, so the relatives travelling from further away can leave their note a week early rather than scribbling something on a napkin at the table.
You see every note before the wall does. Nothing appears until you approve it, which covers the joke that does not travel, the message from the relative you have not spoken to since the last birthday, and anything misspelled in a hurry.
Only people you send the link to can open the page, and a password goes further still. Leave the guest of honour off your list until the day, and the notes are waiting rather than spoiled.
They live with the event page rather than in a chat, which is the point: open the link in six months and the notes are still there in the order they arrived. There is no printed book, so keep the page.
Yes. Add a partner, child or sibling as a collaborator with the level of access you want, and approving notes stops being a job that falls to whoever happens to be awake.
Get Started
Open a wishes page instead of a chat thread, prompt people for a memory, and keep every note readable for years.
