On tiny tools and tea menus

I have a lot of different kinds of tea. And because I enjoy tea, I am frequently given yet more kinds of tea. This is generally a great situation, but there are some associated inconveniences.

All my teas are stored in a single cupboard, below my kitchen counter, which is just big enough to hold them all. This makes physically browsing my tea collection an uncomfortable and time-consuming exercise of sitting on the floor, unpacking and then re-packing the cupboard. And because I have so many choices, sometimes deciding what tea I want to drink at any given time is just too hard, and I end up not having tea at all.

In the past I had tried to solve this with paper lists of what teas I have, but invariably these would get out of date, covered in tea or lost.

Then, I came across Keystatic and its integration with Astro, my favourite tool for mostly-static sites. My online tea menu was born as a way to play around with new toys in a low-stakes project, but it has become one of the most day-to-day useful things I've ever built. It's super simple, just a single page of generated HTML and a tiny bit of JavaScript, and runs for free on Cloudflare Pages and GitHub.

Me and my partner actually keep the inventory list up to date because it is so easy to edit - Keystatic provides a nice interface, authenticated via our GitHub accounts, so we can't even get distracted tweaking the code when we need to add a new kind of tea. When we add a tea, we record the brew time and temperature, so anyone wanting that tea knows how to make it best. Guests can access the menu via a nice short URL, or a QR code taped to the inside of the tea cupboard (so I can't lose it).

But my absolute favourite feature is the button to suggest a random tea, complete with pun "I'm feeling lucktea". The random choice respects any filters I've set on the menu, so I can be offered just tea bags if I don't have brain space to make loose-leaf tea, or only caffeinated things when I'm in need.

Since making the tea menu last October, I've consumed so much more tea, and many more different kinds, with so much less stress. Yay for building tiny tools to solve actual problems in my life.

The soundtrack to today's post is the album "In Which..." by the Teacups, and in particular this track