Behind the scenes
How this site was made
This site was built in a few sessions with Claude Code, Anthropic's coding assistant. I described what I wanted and it wrote the code, while I made the decisions. It costs $0/month to run.
The pieces
| Piece | What it does | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | Hosts the site at a public link | Free |
| Pages Functions | Render each page and handle saving entries | Free (100k requests/day) |
| Cloudflare D1 | A small SQLite database for entries and quests | Free (5 GB) |
| Cloudflare R2 | Stores photos | Free (10 GB) |
| OpenStreetMap + Leaflet | The curiosity map | Free |
No GitHub, no WordPress, no website builder. The code lives in a folder on my laptop, and one command publishes it.
How an entry gets here
- Capture. A tiny app on my phone's home screen opens straight to the camera. I snap a photo (optional) and type a note. The date, time, place and weather fill in automatically. It even works offline and syncs later.
- Investigate. New entries land in a private inbox as open questions. I ask Claude to research them: it looks at the photo, uses a prompt tailored to the entry's theme (for a building: "discuss the architectural style, the likely date it was built, and describe its features using technical terms…"), and drafts an answer with sources.
- Publish. I read the draft, fix what's wrong, add what I learned, and hit publish.
Privacy
- Photos are resized on my phone before upload, which strips the hidden GPS data they normally carry.
- Map locations are rounded to about a kilometre.
- Nothing is public until I explicitly publish it.