mostka.sk

Mostka.sk is a personal platform built both as an author portfolio and a programmer technical portfolio in one. The primary content is my story — a seven-year transformation from 155 kilograms and methamphetamine addiction to an ultramarathon below Elbrus — and the autobiographical book "7 Years to Life" which I am currently writing.

Technically, it is a Symfony 8.1 application running on PHP 8.5 with a PostgreSQL database. The entire site is built on aggressive caching: every public page is served directly from cache without a single database query. The blog (Notes) reads Markdown files from disk, eliminating DB dependency for static content. Deployment is managed via Deployer.

A unique feature of the site is the gaming terminal — interactive text adventures built on a custom JS engine (state machine + typewriter effect). Each game simulates one of my life expeditions: climbing Elbrus, cold-water immersion in a frozen lake, or the Domaša ultramarathon.

I systematically tackled SEO on this site with AI assistance. The result is full hreflang implementation for 7 languages (sk, en, cs, de, es, fr, pl), structured data (JSON-LD) for every page, XML sitemap via presta/sitemap-bundle, and technically flawless canonical tags. Each language version has custom translations of headings, meta descriptions, and URL slugs.

I also used AI for graphics creation — all illustrations and visuals on the site are generated by artificial intelligence and tailored to the author's personal story. The result is a visually consistent platform built without a graphic designer.

Technical SEO analysis revealed one non-trivial bug: the sitemap got stuck in an infinite redirect loop for crawlers without a session cookie. I identified and fixed this edge case based on my own SEO audit.