Online shortstayguide.com
ShortStayGuide
A city in one, two or three days. In three languages.
Globe points: illustration
In short
Tri-locale curated travel guide platform (EN/FR/ES).
3,087 city guides (343 cities × 3 durations), 17,445 persona guides, 2,580 neighborhoods, 540 road trips, 333 worth-it verdicts, 46 country itineraries, 83 day-trip hubs, 48 food guides, 93 articles: 24,255 total content pieces, 3D globe, semantic search on the edge, trip planner with PDF export, currency switcher. ~61 K LOC, 69 components (48 Astro + 21 Preact islands).
Highlights
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Interactive 3D Globe
WebGL navigation with per-city markers
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Semantic search on the edge
Cloudflare Vectorize + Workers AI at the edge
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Persistent trip planner
D1 storage, PDF export (Browser Rendering), shareable nanoid links
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Currency switcher
Live exchange rates per guide
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Dynamic OG images
Generated on the fly with Satori + resvg
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GDPR + hreflang + llms.txt
Cookie consent, EN/FR/ES hreflang, llms.txt for AI crawlers
By the numbers
- 3,087 City guides (3 locales)
- 343 Unique cities
- 24,255 Total content pieces
- ~17,900 Geo stops
- ~61K Lines
- < 10 MiB Worker total
The story
Why I built it
Low-cost flights turned the weekend into exploration territory. A backpack, two days, a city you don’t know. It became a passion. But once on the ground, the real question is: what must I see to feel I genuinely made the most of my time?
ShortStayGuide answers that: one curated guide per city, straight to the essentials, no drowning in 400 generic POIs. Built for fast travellers, by one of them.
Structural technical decisions
Astro 6.2 SSG + Preact islands on Cloudflare
Over 24,000 pages statically generated at build time (city guides × 3 languages, persona guides, neighborhoods, road trips, food, articles), spread across 94 page templates + 19 dynamic endpoints, with selective hydration only on the 21 Preact islands (globe, mega-menu, search, trip planner, currency switcher). Zero JS on the overwhelming majority of the site: SEO keeps its priority.
Content Collections + Zod as source of truth
Over 24,000 markdown files with strictly validated frontmatter (Zod 4) feed all routing (city / country / continent / duration / guide / persona / neighborhood / article / food / roadtrip) with no CMS. Reproducible builds; D1 only backs the trip planner’s user data.
Cobe for the globe, Leaflet lazy-loaded
Cobe ships ~19 KB canvas-based instead of importing Three.js. And Leaflet (~150 KB) only loads on the guide routes that actually need it, never on the home, never on aggregation pages.
The non-trivial challenge
Industrializing content at SEO scale
Producing 3,087 coherent city guides (3 durations × 343 cities × 5 continents × 3 languages EN/FR/ES), each with geo-located stops (lat / lng), normalized tags, excerpts under 90 chars, UPPERCASE continent. Plus 17,445 persona guides, 2,580 neighborhoods, 540 road trips, 333 worth-it verdicts, 46 country itineraries, 83 day-trip hubs, 48 food guides, 93 articles: 24,255 total content pieces.
Fitting all of it into 94 page templates + 19 dynamic endpoints + aggregation pages per city / country / continent / persona, without blowing up build time or schema consistency. The real boss isn’t the globe or perf: it’s schema discipline at volume × locales.
Lesson learned
The islands architecture lets you buy interactivity à la carte: Leaflet (150 KB) never touches the homepage, and the site stays essentially zero-JS where it matters for SEO.
Tech specs
Where it runs @astrojs/cloudflare · Workers AI · Vectorize · D1 · Browser Rendering
| Framework | Astro 6.2 · Preact (21 islands) · Zod 4 · TypeScript |
|---|---|
| UI | Tailwind 4 · Cobe (WebGL globe) · Leaflet · Fuse.js |
| Edge / AI | @astrojs/cloudflare · Workers AI · Vectorize · Browser Rendering |
| Data | D1 · KV (weather + profiles) · Content Collections |
| Growth | PostHog · @anthropic-ai/sdk · JSON-LD · Sitemap |
