I build a Website for my Home

We have lived in our home for five years now. I have done a lot of stuff in it, both physical improvements and digital additions. My house is on the edge of being too smart, which is exactly how I like it.

One thing I love to do is garden. Initially this just meant growing edible plants in my garden beds, but as time has passed I have started to push outside the beds and expand my garden to encompass more of my yard. Doing this though required paying more attention to the species of plants that were already there and I planted.

Garden journaling has always failed me. Digital, analog, it did not matter. I would start all excited documenting my plans and maybe even the first planting, then nothing. Come October when we started cleaning out I had no notes on what went well or what went poorly.

I had always wanted a little site for my home that someone could visit to learn about it and realized this could solve my note taking problem. At the time I had gotten more intrigued by Go. So I started writing. I intentionally avoided LLMs and just tried to figure out as much as possible through documentation. And I ended up with a pretty solid piece of software.

My goal with this website is for it to be discoverable by passers-by. Currently it has a little homepage with some details about the house, the current temperature and humidity, and the weekly rainfall(quite a bit this week).

But the real fun is my plant database. I started adding labels with QR codes to my plants as I identified or planted them. Now anyone passing by or in my yard can scan this QR code and get a page showing information about that plant and its species.

Each QR code leads to a stake id, which is tied to a plant. My current stakes are temporary, so making new ones for new plants is not a big deal, but ideally I would figure out a way to make them permanent, maybe by etching them directly onto the stakes. Then I can reassign the stake to a new plant whenever I want.

Along with the public facing page, each plant also has more data on the admin side. Particularly notes. I can add notes, and additional photos very quickly. I even setup a custom redirect on my phone’s browser, which redirects from the public page to the admin page. So adding a new photo or note just requires a quick scan of the QR code, then I can add what I want. This has made keeping a better running log of a plant’s progress a lot more natural.

I have a few features I want to add and having this starting point will lead to more ideas. Currently I want to add a QR code to my in progress Little Free Library where people can leave notes for other readers (might be a terrible idea), expose more climate information by adding a weewx dashboard, and a log of projects we have done or are doing that are visible from outside.

It has been a fun addition to my web portfolio, something small, meaningful, and maybe something that will drive connections with neighbors.