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Comment by wuldr

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Comment by wuldr

Hello, HN!

I've made an open-source, client-side web app for collecting mountain peaks, generally known as "peak bagging" in the hiking/mountaineering community.

The main purpose of the tool is to visualize which peaks you have been to, and which peaks you want to visit in the future. It's fun and gratifying to look at and remember all the summits you have ascended, and it can be motivating to also have an overview of the peaks you haven't been to yet.

There are several great websites and tools that let you do similar things, but they are often too complex and packed with features for my taste. I used to collect peaks in a spreadsheet, but visualizing the peaks in a map is much more fun. In addition, I realized that visualizing peaks you want to visit in the future adds a gamification element to it, and that would add some more motivation to get out and have fun in the mountains.

There are three main features:

1. Register peaks you want to visit. 2. Register the peaks you have visited. 3. Register the dates of your visits/ascents.

The web app is all client-side, and you keep your own "peak database" (hence the name "Peakbase") stored on disk. This was one of the main ideas behind the architecture of the tool; it avoids the need for a user account, and no one needs to rely on me keeping the servers running.

The tool comes with a default "peak database", consisting of the highest mountains on each continent, and a large number of peaks in Norway (due to Norway being the original target area of the tool). However, for most people I think it's easiest to start from scratch and register only the peaks of interest (by double-clicking on locations in the map).

Web development and UI/UX is not my strong suit, but I wanted a simple tool for my hobby, and maybe it can be useful for others as well :) Let me know if you have any feedback!

PS: Peakbase can be used for collecting any type of geographic locations, such as climbing sites, fishing spots, camping sites etc. Personally I also keep a separate file for nice skiing lines :)

Replies wuldr · 2023-08-02
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