I wanted to document my 10-week "work-cation" to South Korea. The idea was to keep my family, friends, and colleagues updated on my adventures—and at the same time have a nice way to save my memories.

At first, I looked at Polarsteps as a SaaS solution, but I wasn’t happy with the features it offered. I wanted full control over the design and what kind of information I could show.

Most importantly, I wanted a grid showing all the days of my trip, color coding, and—of course—statistics!

I also checked out other blogging solutions like WordPress, BearBlog, Wix, SquareSpace, Ghost, and more. They were either too expensive, too limiting, or too hard to use.

Then I realized: I’m a trained programmer. I could just build it myself!

The Limitations

My project came with a few interesting requirements. A

1. Editable from my tablet

I’ll have my work laptop with me on the trip, but I’d rather not use it for personal things like blogging. Instead, I plan to use my Samsung tablet. The catch is: I can’t really code on it. So editing should be limited to text writing and uploading images.

2. Not too expensive

I’ll be relying on multiple tools to host this blog, so I want to stay within free-tier options wherever possible.

3. Durable

The blog should last. I don’t want to rely too heavily on services that might suddenly change their policies or pricing.

The Start

I began with the Next.js Blog Starter Kit, which already looked close to what I wanted.

Then I made a list of features I needed:

A big grid with all the days of the trip, color-coded
A page for every day, where I could write a short story and upload photos
A page for every week, with a longer recap
The ability to write “blogs” covering specific topics

I had more ideas (like search functionality and tracking which posts were already read), but I had to prioritize.

Since I had used Vercel for small projects before, I chose it for hosting. It’s super convenient, but I’d need to stick to the free tier to avoid costs.

Design Decisions

While developing, I quickly ran into some limitations.

Storing images in the Git repository won’t work

My first idea was to store all the images directly in the GitHub repository. That seemed simple—I could even write a build script to generate multiple sizes for optimization.

But in practice, this was terrible. Vercel wouldn’t handle it.

Here’s the math:

70 days + 10 weeks + ~20 blog posts ≈ 100 pages
~5 images per page = 500 images
2.5 MB per image × 500 = 1.25 GB of raw images

And if I stored 3 different resolutions, the repo could easily reach ~2 GB. Every time I added new photos, Vercel would need to download the entire repo. That would exceed both their build time and data limits. Especially the building limit, which is 45 minutes a month. I want to deploy everyday, with gives me at most 90 seconds per deploy.

So I needed an image hosting service that could also handle optimization.

Where to host?

I compared a few options:

Imgur – Easy, but requires images to be public and isn’t great to configure
Catbox.moe – Open source, simple, but hard to take seriously because of the anime branding
Cloudinary – The biggest player, very powerful, but expensive ($89/month for the cheapest paid tier)
ImageKit – Similar features to Cloudinary, but cheaper and easier to use

I went with ImageKit. It gave me everything I needed (image transformations and a usable UI on my tablet), and their free tier was enough to get started. If I need more, the upgrade is just $9/month.

But hosting all the images has a downside

I wanted the grid of my trip to show a thumbnail for each day. By the end, that would mean loading 70 thumbnails every time someone visited the page.

Here’s the math:

Let’s say 5 people check the site daily
On average, there will be ~35 images in the grid during the trip
5 people × 70 days × 35 images = 12,250 requests

Now imagine someone new discovers the blog and decides to read all 70 posts:

Grid (70 requests) → Day 1 → Grid (70 requests) → Day 2 → Grid (70 requests) …
By the end, just reading everything = 4,900 requests!

My solution: Save compressed thumbnails statically in the repo. That way, the grid doesn’t need to hit ImageKit every time.

(Yes, I could’ve used caching, but I didn’t want to add state to the blog yet.)

How to generate the thumbnails?

This created a new problem: how do I add thumbnails to the repo from my tablet?

I didn’t want to compress images manually—ImageKit already does that.

So I set up GitHub Actions. Whenever I finish editing a blog post (.md file in the repo), an action runs. It checks for new images, fetches compressed thumbnails from ImageKit, and commits them automatically.

This way, all I have to do is:

Upload photos to ImageKit
Write a blog post in the GitHub web interface
Commit

That’s it. I even added a GitHub Action to auto-deploy to Vercel, making the process even smoother.

Vibe Coding

I’ve written a lot about the process here, but honestly, most of the code was “vibe-coded” with Claude.AI.

I had a clear vision of what I wanted, but not all the skills to build every feature. Claude helped me get 80% of the way there quickly—but the last 20% was always the hardest. Sometimes the generated code was messy, hard to follow, or tricky to debug since I hadn’t written it myself.

It definitely boosted my productivity, but the downside is that the codebase is now a patchwork of quick fixes. If I had more time, I’d prefer to build things more carefully and understand each part better.

Conclusion

The project uses the following tools:

Next.js & Tailwind CSS
Static Markdown files for posts
Vercel for hosting and deployment
ImageKit for image hosting and transformations
GitHub Actions for thumbnail generation and deployment

Check out the full GitHub repository here.

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About me

My Hotel - Mangrove