For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a side-project: Niche Experiences (nichexps.com). It has listings of “niche experiences” in UK cities. It all started when I read Marc Lou’s blog post on how to get customers with programmatic SEO and thought I should try it out.

Every few months I tinker on a new project and the most common failure mode is that it’s too big to actually complete, so I never finish it, and so I never launch it. This particular model of generating listings of something programmatically seemed like a project that I could finish.

And so, a couple of weeks later, here we are – an actually released project! It gave me a chance to try out Astro, which seems really nice so far. And then, of course, there are a few APIs involved.

Would you like to find rage rooms in London or axe throwing in Edinburgh? Or maybe you just want to find some niche experiences in Liverpool? There’s lots of fun stuff to try out!

I also spent a bit of time doing SEO stuff (meta tags, sitemaps, Google Search console) and also spent some time trying to make the site fast, both of which were great learning experiences. Oh, and it has dark mode too! :D