Thanks! I'm finalizing paid subscriptions and premium features. Then I will move my focus on mobile app which is kind of requirement for outdoor platform.
Well, not much at the moment :) It's still all very fresh and I guess logging and observability is afterthought. I'm hosting app on Heroku which provides some basics.
For those interested in the technical implementation:
I built VeloPlanner with my favorite tech stack: Elixir/Phoenix, React, and MapLibre GL JS. The architecture is a hybrid approach:
- Phoenix controllers for static content (route guides, listings)
- Phoenix LiveView for most of the forms
- React for the planner and interactive maps where high performance is critical
One of the bigger technical challenges was self-hosting all the infrastructure - I'm running my own map tile server and routing engine (Graphhopper) on beefy servers with lots of RAM to maintain full control over the cycling-specific routing algorithms. The memory requirements are substantial, especially for processing large-scale route data across multiple regions.
This approach lets me customize the routing to prioritize official cycling routes while still giving users flexibility when planning custom segments.
Happy to dive deeper into any specific aspect if there's interest!
I used Claude AI project to attach requirement for the project. Then I just went with single conversation. I specified that I want to do it in small steps and then was just doing copy -> paste until I reached the limit. I think it was because I was doing one big convo instead attaching code to the project.
So pretty simple flow, totally not scalable for bigger projects.
I need to read and check Cursor AI which can also use Claude models.
I wanted to develop a simple tool to compare maps. I thought about using this opportunity to try out Claude AI for coding a project from scratch. It worked surprisingly well!
At least 95% of the code was generated by AI (I reached the limit so had to add final bits on my own).
Newsletter signup form uses LiveView https://veloplanner.com/newsletter/new
I was testing LiveView with page transitions and it was working quite nicely with maps as well (maps were handled by JS of course). You can play with it here https://travelermap.net/ - you can check search (cmd + k) which is powered by LV.
EDIT: As for plans for veloplanner, I'll be adding some of the interactive features (comments etc) as LiveView.
This basemap looks awesome. Need to play with this and see how hard is to run it on my own. It would totally fit nicely with my website https://travelermap.net.
You can always start with tiles from https://openstreetmap.org Or use one of the commercial providers which offers free tiers. There are quite a few smaller providers that are not super expensive.
You can always setup your own tile server. It's not that hard and can be cheap (if you don't count your time). I recommend, checking https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler
I’m developing https://travelermap.net with my brother. It’s a map of National Parks all over the world and more detailed map with other kinds of parks in US.
We started adding photos and more content to US parks but planing to cover more countries.
Built with Elixir/Phoenix, Typescript and Maplibre.
I'm running a https://velomapa.pl - website with cycling related stuff (routes, races, photos, and other stuff) in Poland.
It's a super seasonal niche. During the season it brings around $1000/month through various types of ads and donations.
Now, I'm building and growing https://travelermap.net, which hopefully will work nicely all year around. It's also a content site that I'm planning to monetize using ads.
Initially, I just wanted to map parks from the US but then I got carried away. The website also allows previewing of Wikipedia articles about each park.
Data about national parks come from Wikipedia. I'm sure it's missing quite a few less popular parks. Let me know if you find something missing.
It's built with Elixir/Phoenix, TypeScript, and MapLibre. It's just a static site for now but I'm planning to add user accounts and community aspects to it. I think it will be cool to allow rating, reviewing, and uploading user photos.
You should check out https://microconf.com and their youtube channel. They also have Slack community called "MicrConf Connect" and podcast "The Startups For the Rest of Us". Lots of good resources there.
Can you share links to those Discord servers? I'm also building project related to maps. Right now, it's using leaflet and raster tiles but I'm strongly considering switching to maplibre and vector tiles.
Are you working full time on your mapping app? Looks really cool.