Case study · Outdoors · Data-driven content
Pecker & Jay Gardening, fishing, foraging and homesteading, place by place.
Enter a town or postal code and get a seasonal guide to what to plant, what's biting and what's in the woods this week.
01 — The brief
The problem it solves
Generic gardening and fishing advice ignores where you live. Frost dates, soil temperature, the fish that are active and the wild foods in season all depend on place.
The brief: a field guide specific to one place — any town in North America, Europe or Africa — built from local climate, water and season data.
02 — What we built
Features that do real work.
Find my area
Type a town, postal code or ZIP — or use your location — and the guide works out the hardiness zone, frost dates and ecological region.
Place guides
Live weather, soil temperature at 6 cm, a seven-day forecast, sun and moon, named waters within 20 km and a long-run climate chart.
The day
Eight phases of the day calculated from the sun's real position, with what is active in each, and a “rotate the Earth” widget.
Fishing, water by water
Species in season sorted by the kind of water, always linked to the official regulations.
Zone map and almanac
USDA 2023 and Canadian hardiness zones in one interactive map, plus a lunar-month almanac.
The Big Outside
Read-aloud stories for young children with no tracking at all, plus lessons written three ways — for ages 2, 4 and 6 — and games by age.
03 — How it's put together
Structure
Each pre-built place has eight templated pages (guide, the day, fishing, gardening, foraging, homesteading, ground, resources), cross-linked to species, crop, region and zone pages.
Under the hood
- Next.js on Netlify, with live data from Open-Meteo and OpenStreetMap, and species photos credited to each iNaturalist photographer
- Schema: Organization, WebSite with SearchAction, BreadcrumbList; Article on species, crop and region pages, with FAQPage on species and crops
- AI-assisted guide text is disclosed on the About page, not hidden
Details that matter
- Foraging pages lead with the poisonous species each plant resembles
- Fishing defers to the regulator every time
- Shared-land listings show only a randomised area about 3 km wide, never an address
A data product wearing a magazine's clothes: live APIs and open datasets do the heavy lifting, and the writing makes it feel local.
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