I wanted to gather cool and unpopular places from a neighborhood, like old castles. I started this project in 2015 and I’m still maintaining it, and from time to time I’m doing fixes.
What I learned?
Technical: SPA got terrible SEO, only a few crawlers executes JS on page to actually read data from the page (or at least show the place image instead the app image from og:image) I tried many times to add some pre-rendering and make it hybrid, but I failed. Eventually, I converted app to NextJS and I added dynamic og:images (using my other project: https://bannerly.io) and number of impressions and clicks increased mostly thanks to sharing places by people on social media. I also plan to use no-code automation tool (probably https://integromat.com it’s cheaper than Zapier and probably more powerful) to post places to Instagram every day.
There is no money/revenue in this project but I like to play around with it anyway. It would be cool earn at least for maintenance costs on it but I don’t have any idea. I was thinking about selling tickets online for places where the tickets are required but no one is interested in this idea.
Non-technical: There is a very small subset of people who would like to use travel apps. It’s easier to use Google or local guides to find great destinations.
I wanted to gather cool and unpopular places from a neighborhood, like old castles. I started this project in 2015 and I’m still maintaining it, and from time to time I’m doing fixes.
What I learned?
Technical: SPA got terrible SEO, only a few crawlers executes JS on page to actually read data from the page (or at least show the place image instead the app image from og:image) I tried many times to add some pre-rendering and make it hybrid, but I failed. Eventually, I converted app to NextJS and I added dynamic og:images (using my other project: https://bannerly.io) and number of impressions and clicks increased mostly thanks to sharing places by people on social media. I also plan to use no-code automation tool (probably https://integromat.com it’s cheaper than Zapier and probably more powerful) to post places to Instagram every day.
There is no money/revenue in this project but I like to play around with it anyway. It would be cool earn at least for maintenance costs on it but I don’t have any idea. I was thinking about selling tickets online for places where the tickets are required but no one is interested in this idea.
Non-technical: There is a very small subset of people who would like to use travel apps. It’s easier to use Google or local guides to find great destinations.