My wife and I wanted somewhere new for our sixth anniversary. Cökertme sounded good, and Ruina Glamping came up when I looked it up on Google Maps. I tapped the link to their site and got a 404.
It shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did. I'd deactivated my Instagram at some point before this, and now I had to turn it back on just to find a phone number and actually book the stay.
By the end of our first day there, I'd already decided I was going to fix that. I spent a few hours a day on it for the rest of the trip, working right there on the property, with Claude helping me pull the content together. Astro was easy — I'd built plenty of static sites with it already. Keystatic was newer to me, but it was exactly what I needed: git-based, nothing extra to manage, simple enough that a glamping site owner who'd never touched a CMS in his life could actually run it himself. It was done the morning we checked out.
I sent him the link over WhatsApp during breakfast service, since he was too busy running the place to talk. Told him I'd built it for fun, since they didn't have one, and that he could just have it. He loved it. We sat down over coffee so I could walk him through it. Claude had gotten his name wrong somewhere in the translation files while I was building it, and I hadn't caught it until we were sitting right there together. Not my finest moment.
Their old developer told them they'd missed a domain renewal, and that getting it back from whoever had swooped in and bought it would cost 9,000 TRY. I checked Cloudflare right there over coffee — the domain wasn't owned by anyone. It was just sitting there, available to register, for about $10, the way most .com domains are. Nobody had bought it. The same guy was charging 200 TRY every time they wanted a single word changed on the site.
Everything about the new site is his now — the domain, the Cloudflare account, the deploy. I only kept the repo. I logged into his account from my own terminal just long enough to ship it, and once I got home we spent a couple of hours on the phone going through the Keystatic dashboard together. One walkthrough was all it took — he was fully confident running it himself.
That's when he asked if he could put his QR menu on the same setup, instead of paying 4,000 TRY for three months to host it somewhere else. That question turned into bizedemi.menu — a QR menu for small restaurants and cafes, free, no catch. A customer scans a code at the table and gets the menu right there on their phone. The owner can change a price or add a dish himself, without emailing anyone or waiting on an invoice. No app to download, no recurring fee, nobody charging by the word.
Every small business should get to use the free stuff companies like Cloudflare and Google already give away, instead of paying someone to gatekeep it from them. This site, and that one, are my way of putting a little of that back into the world.