I’ve been quietly building out two very bleeding edge music tech projects over the past couple of months, which I’ll talk about soon. But before that, I’ve re-platformed and released two ideas that have been in the back of my head for well over a year:

1. Planatom builds on my previous effort to start aggregating local planning applications and making them searchable, nationally.

   

   Previously I did this in the form of 10 location specific microsites - built as static sites with Astro. At a certain scale, that started to fail - so this new version ports to a Rails, Phlex and Vite stack (which is really nice!). With the new platform, it’s been possible to go from 10 to 100+ local portals, and to add some really nice feature extraction like number of new dwellings to be created.

   The old sites indexed very well with Google, so re-pointing/porting them to the new domain has meant I can launch to ~40k page views in the first two weeks.

2. Winfred is an aggregator of UK funding announcements that extracts key features like the amount, the stage, the investors, the founders, planned use of funds etc, and mungs in data from sources like Companies House to verify the announcement and cash at bank vs raised. And yes, I’ve been looking for a use for that domain for a long time…

   

   It’s super useful for me, as I’m pivoting my consultancy more towards that space. It does a few additional nice things, like currency conversion to GBP, and you can follow startups and investors for new updates.

I’ve been really enjoying the Rails + Phlex + Vite stack, leaning on Custom Elements for any interactions that are required. For me, it’s the happy middle ground between React on one end, and Stimulus on the other. Rapid, clear, easy to deploy with Kamal, and with great performance.

I’ve got something much bigger on the music tech side coming up - consolidating almost two decades worth of know-how and accumulated background IP into high-value agentic tools. But that’s for another day.