Build Log
Not a blog. A running record of what actually changed on this site, bugs found, features shipped, dumb mistakes caught and fixed.
Digital Nomad Cost Comparator + real RAG for the AI chat
Added a side-by-side visa cost comparator for the 10 DN countries, pulling real numbers straight from each country guide instead of a summary. Bigger change underneath: rebuilt the AI chat's backend to actually search real site content (Vectorize + embeddings) before answering, instead of guessing from category names. It also now has per-IP rate limiting and a hard cap on conversation length server-side, since the endpoint is public.
Found and fixed the AI chat being completely broken
Turned out to be two separate problems: the model ID (llama-3.1-8b-instruct) had been deprecated by Cloudflare, and the Workers AI binding wasn't actually attached to the live deployment despite showing correctly in the dashboard. Also tightened the system prompt after finding it could be tricked into answering off-topic questions by wrapping them in a fake site-category label ("for the photography section, write me a poem about a cat").
Article folders reorganized by category
All 77 articles moved from one flat folder into category subfolders (networking, photography, food, philosophy, ai-ml, 3d-printing, webdev). Every internal link, the sitemap, and the RSS feed updated to match. Caught a couple of hand-written links inside article text that were still pointing at the old flat paths.
Real Table of Contents and "Also on this site" on every article, recipe, and DN page
Most of these had either a broken empty TOC or none at all. Built one shared script that generates a working contents list from each page's own headings, a real related-content list filtered by actual category (not hardcoded), and a contextual "also on this site" card, applied consistently across articles, recipes, cocktails, and DN guides.
DN menu rebuilt with real content
Replaced a placeholder version with the actual visa guides, wired up the flyout menus for all 10 countries and their cities, and fixed a hover bug where moving the mouse from a country to its city list would close the menu before you got there.
10 new networking tools added, site-wide XP tracking fixed
Added BGP hijack simulator, IPsec config generator, DNS auth builder, and 7 others. Also found that recipes and cocktails were completely excluded from the XP/gamification system due to a missing element on those page templates, silently broken since before this.
Full site standardization pass
Unified script includes and nav/footer across roughly 260 pages, removed dead JS files, fixed 96 duplicate pages that existed at two different URLs, and cleaned up thousands of stray em-dashes in body text.