Loontrace
Small tools, built out of plain tables.
A personal project, built for the pleasure of building it. Loontrace takes an ordinary table of rows and columns and puts a usable little application in front of it — a form, a list, something that works on a phone — without a build step or a framework in the way.
| date | place | species | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| 05-18 | Little Otter Bay | Common Loon | 2 |
| 05-18 | Little Otter Bay | Hooded Merganser | 4 |
| 05-21 | Kettle Pond | Bufflehead | 6 |
| 05-24 | North Inlet | Common Loon | 1 |
- Common Loon
- Hooded Merganser
- Bufflehead
- Common Loon
What it does
Three steps, and not much else.
01 — Keep
Start with a table
Rows and columns, nothing exotic. Whatever is already written down goes in more or less as it stands.
02 — Build
Arrange some screens
Forms, lists, boards and detail views are laid out directly against the table. Changes go live immediately — there is no release to schedule.
03 — Publish
Put it on the home screen
The result installs on a phone or desktop like any other app, works offline, and updates itself.
Access
If you hit a sign-in prompt, that is working as intended.
The tools built here are personal ones and are closed by default — not because of what is in them, but because there is no reason for them to be open. They sit behind Cloudflare Access, which checks identity before a request reaches anything at all.
So an unexpected sign-in prompt on this domain is access control doing its job, not a public login page. There is no account to open, nothing here asks for a password, and no credential should ever be entered on this site.
About
A personal project, not a service.
Loontrace is built and run by one person, for their own use and for a handful of people they have invited directly. It is not a company and not a product. There is nothing to buy, no account to create, no mailing list, and no advertising anywhere on it.
It exists mostly because building it was more interesting than not building it. If you have arrived here by accident, there is genuinely nothing to do here.