I spent 5 months building almanacindia.com — an editorial platform documenting India's genuinely hidden destinations. Not "offbeat" places that show up on every listicle. Places like Bara Bhangal (a permanently inhabited village with no road, reachable only by a 5-day trek over a 4,700m Himalayan pass) and Hunderman (a village that was Pakistani territory until 1971, 8km from Kargil).
Here's everything I built and how.
The Stack
Framework: Next.js 15 App Router with TypeScript, deployed on Cloudflare Pages via OpenNext. Static generation for 1,500+ pages at build time. No Git — Proton Drive with AES-256 encrypted backups.
Maps: Mapbox GL v3 Standard style. 96 Indian cities, 3D cinematic dusk lighting, destination pins, routing between places, satellite toggle, live rain/snow overlay from Open-Meteo (15-min cache). Night mode activates automatically after 7pm local time.
