How The Great Britain Guide is built
Measured numbers
Counted by the collection, not written by hand. A figure we cannot support is left out rather than shown as zero.
- Pages
- 185,743
- Page count over time
- Page count has not changed: 185,743 pages measured, 30 Sep to 10 Oct
- Uptime
- 100.00% over 30 days
4th of 15 measured in Knowledge/Travel, by sitemap URLs
From the public status feed
How it is built, by role
The same roles apply across the whole collection. Nothing in this block is specific to this site; what the site says about itself is quoted word for word below it.
- 1
Edge network
Visitors reach a site through an edge layer: a content delivery network with a web application firewall in front of it.
- 2
Application host
The edge talks to an application host that serves the site and renders its pages.
- 3
Data
What the pages show comes from a relational database or, for a site pre-rendered at build time, from data files built into its release.
- 4
Scheduled measurement
The collection measures its sites on a schedule: content dates and site health nightly, page counts read from each site’s sitemap weekly. Every reading is kept with its date. A site too large to re-walk is not re-measured, and shows no trend.
- 5
Public status feed
A monitoring panel sends a signed report on uptime, deploys and backups once a day, and the Operations page publishes it. A figure on this page that comes from that report says so.
In the site's own words
Each passage is copied unaltered from a page the site publishes, with the address it was taken from and the date we took it. We add nothing between them.
“Machine-readable full content of every place in the guide. Generated at build time from open data (OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, Wikidata, ONS). Please credit the underlying sources when quoting; see attributions on each entry below.”
“The Great Britain Guide is a free guide to the United Kingdom with no paywall and no signup to browse. The aim is simple: a fast, honest reference for travellers and locals — castles, towns, museums, national parks, beaches and thousands more places worth visiting.”
“Every page is pre-rendered at build time. Place data is sourced from OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, Wikidata and ONS open datasets, fetched once and committed to the repository so the live site never needs to call an external API.”
“Most descriptions are composed deterministically from structured facts (year founded, area, county, designation), and longer passages are quoted or summarised from Wikipedia and the official heritage registers, with sources listed on every page.”
