Looking back, dated two days after the last commit.
Five people, one trip to Sicily and a planning tool in twelve days
Instead of a spreadsheet and three group chats I built our travel group a small planning site with votes, a budget and a day plan.
Five people want to go to Sicily in June. Usually that means a spreadsheet, a few group chats, links that get lost somewhere, and nobody knows what has already been decided. This time I opened an editor on March 30.
Twelve days and 51 commits later there was a site that holds the whole plan. Built on my own, live on GitHub Pages. Accommodation, flights, the car, activities, a packing list, the budget, votes, an idea wall, a day plan and tasks for who does what.
Technically it’s plain on purpose. Static HTML and JavaScript, no database, no framework. One thing was still needed: the data has to sync when two people add something at the same time. That’s what the Cloudflare Worker behind it is for. It handles sign-in with GitHub, writes the data back into the repository through the GitHub API and has a small scraper. When someone pastes a link to an offer, the worker reads the page in. Nobody has to retype what’s already written there.
The demo on this page shows three parts with sample data and no real names. In the votes, everyone picks an option and the result is there right away. The budget adds up what’s planned. And the day plan fixes what happens on which day. Those are the three places where groups usually get stuck in the chat.
Unterkünfte
Übersicht & Vergleich aller Optionen
Karte
6 StandorteAbstimmung
Gruppenranking
Schnellvergleich
| # | Name | Ort | SZ | Strand | Palermo | Storno | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Casa Limone | Mondello | 945 € | 27,00 € | 9.2 (48) | 3 | 300 m | 12 km | Kostenlos bis 01.06. |
| 2 | Appartamento Kalsa | Palermo Altstadt | 1020 € | 29,14 € | 4.8/5 (31) | 2 | ~12 km | zentral | Kostenlos bis 25.05. |
| 3 | Villa Zagara | Capaci | 1180 € | 33,71 € | 9.5 (64) | 3 | 1,2 km | 20 km | Kostenlos bis 05.06. |
| 4 | Baia Blu Apartments | Isola delle Femmine | 760 € | 21,71 € | 8.4 (112) | 2 | 150 m | 17 km | Nein |
| 5 | Casa del Pescatore | Terrasini | 690 €TOP | 19,71 € | 8.1 (27) | 3 | 600 m | 33 km | Nein |
| 6 | Dimora Normanna | Cefalù | 1290 € | 36,86 € | 4.97/5 (19) | 3 | 200 m | ~70 km | Kostenlos bis 30.05. |
Im Detail
6 OptionenVilla Zagara
Villa mit Pool · Capaci · Booking.comTry it: the demo runs by itself when it scrolls into view; click anywhere inside to take over. Sample data only.
What I noticed along the way: design matters. As soon as four other people use a site and not just me, it has to look like it works. So there’s a DESIGN.md with colours as CSS variables, a few fixed components and accessibility rules. Every new page uses those instead of reinventing what a button looks like.
Second lesson: for a problem this size, a static front end with a single worker is enough. No database, no server to look after.
In parallel the bigger idea behind it has been growing. I’m sketching a scaffold called TripForge, a planning tool for any group trip, with Next.js, Expo and Supabase. That’s still architecture, not a product. Sicily is what runs today.
Tools and skills: vanilla JavaScript, HTML and CSS, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Workers, GitHub OAuth and the Contents API, a bit of web scraping and a small design system. Plus the question of what five people actually need to agree on something.
Now June just has to come.