About The Site
This site is a practical learning environment for modern web development, built through a simple learn-by-doing approach with Grok Chat / Bot.
It began as an experiment in separating content from code so that non-technical people could maintain a basic website. That separation remains useful, but during 2026 it became clear that a chat with Grok Chat / Bot (ordinary language plus connectors) is enough to develop, deploy and maintain the site.
The site is therefore now used as a living example of how a practical, low-maintenance website can be created and kept up to date through simple conversation. I describe a change in chat; Grok Chat / Bot edits the files on GitHub; a push then deploys the changes via Vercel. Everything you see here — the map of pubs, the walks tracks, the calendar, the reports — follows this pattern.
Tools & Platforms Used
GitHub
Version control plus commit history and safe experimentation through branches and pull requests.
Vercel
Hosting, automatic deployments, and excellent developer experience with global content delivery.
Cloudflare
Useful for DNS management. Cloudflare does not support .scot domains, so this site uses IONOS for DNS, pointed at Vercel.
Grok Chat / Bot
The main way this site is updated: ordinary language in chat, plus connectors to GitHub. A push then deploys on Vercel.
How this site is put together
Shared header, footer and menu are loaded once and reused. Everyday wording on Home and About is written in the HTML pages themselves. GitHub is the public source of truth: tell Grok Chat / Bot the change, Grok Chat / Bot edits the file via the connector, Vercel deploys.
Calendar
The calendar is a normal Google Calendar that you create and maintain on the main Google Calendar website (or the phone app). Events added there appear on this site automatically. The page embeds Google’s view: green for our events, red for Partick Thistle fixtures.
Pubs
After a visit, notes and photos are passed to Grok Chat / Bot. Grok Chat / Bot compresses the photos for the web, updates the map data, creates or updates the visit report page, and pushes so Vercel deploys. Pub names, towns, status, dates and map positions live in a simple data file. Leaflet draws the map from that file (green circle = visited, green diamond = visited but now closed, orange square = still to visit). Photos stay in a folder per pub.
Walks
Routes are recorded on a Garmin Fenix (Hike). The FIT file comes from Garmin Connect and is passed to Grok Chat / Bot, which pulls out the track and stats for the Leaflet map. Notes and photos are also passed to Grok Chat / Bot; Grok Chat / Bot compresses the images and creates or updates the detail page and map. OS Maps tracking is the fallback if the watch file is missing.
Web apps
Alongside this website I'm also playing around with web apps, again using Grok Chat / Bot. These web apps can be highly personalised to suit individual use cases. First up is Evening Markets, a stock desk with built-in pricing and news feeds that supports my chosen asset watchlist. Web apps of this kind can be installed from modern browsers and operate like standalone phone apps.