So, hi. This is reading.pet, and this is the first post on it.
The idea has been sitting in my head since 2024. For most of that time it was just a rough dev build on my laptop. No real design, no polish, barely a UI. Enough to save a link, read it back later, and prove to myself that the core actually worked. I used it almost every day in that ugly state.
The thing I really wanted to find out was whether I could run the whole app on Cloudflare. Not bits of it, with a normal server quietly doing the heavy lifting in the background. All of it: the database, the article storage, the fetching, the summaries, the sign-in, the lot. It started more as a test than a product. Is the platform actually there yet, or do you hit a wall halfway and end up renting a box somewhere?
It is there. And honestly it is a pleasure to work with. Deploys are quick, the app is quick, and most of the infrastructure just sits there doing its job while I forget it exists.
The last embarrassing bit was the way it looked, because it still looked like the dev tool it had been for two years. That used to be the part that ate whole weekends. This time I let an LLM do most of the work on the design, and it came out looking like something I would actually want to use. Felt a bit like cheating.
So that is where we are. It runs, it is online, and Bibi is waiting to be fed. I will keep short notes here whenever something changes. No newsletter, nothing to sign up for. Drop by when you feel like it.