WanderingBong

WanderingBong is a slow-travel blog I've been running since 2015. The content is the same — first-person, opinionated, places I've actually been. But the infrastructure underneath has gone through three complete rebuilds, and that evolution is the more interesting story.

Phase 1: WordPress (2015)

Started where most people start. WordPress works — until it doesn't. Stick with it long enough and you stop being a creator and start being a sysadmin, installing plugins to fix the problems caused by other plugins. I wanted to write about trips. I was debugging PHP.

Phase 2: Going headless (2020)

Lockdown. Rebuilt from scratch: Strapi as the backend, Next.js for the frontend, deployed on EC2 with PM2 and HAProxy. The Jamstack approach — finally felt like I had actual control over the content model. It was stable, fast, and mine. I ran it that way for a few years.

Phase 3: Building what I actually needed (2025)

Strapi eventually had the same problem WordPress did — the workflows I'd developed didn't fit what an off-the-shelf CMS was designed for. So I replaced it with something built around how I actually work: a custom Node.js backend, a content model shaped around trips and journals and destinations, my own admin dashboard, and a public blog renderer.

The breakthrough was Journals — a place to capture raw material while traveling. Notes, locations, photos, whatever. Not drafts. Just data points from real experiences. Through a custom MCP server, agents can query these memories rather than generic sources — so what they produce is grounded in what actually happened.

Where it is now

The backend is connected via a custom MCP server, which means any agent can talk to it with full context — what's published, what's in draft, how posts are tagged, what destinations I've covered, what affiliate links are live.

My job now is to show up with the experience. Agents handle everything around the writing — tags, internal linking, SEO metadata, structured content, affiliate placement. What used to take an hour of admin after every post just happens. I focus on the article. The grunt work is theirs.

What's live

38 posts across Thailand, Karnataka, Vietnam, Kolkata, and Rajasthan. Real SEO traction in the Bangalore day-trip cluster. 29 affiliate links placed. The infrastructure is the part I'm now productizing — WanderingBong is Customer Zero for Roami.