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Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Plant Smart’s rebuild was about making a pet-plant toxicity database maintainable after its creator had stopped tending it. Wilhelm Murdoch replaced a brittle SvelteKit toolchain with Hugo, a stylesheet and vanilla JavaScript, first preserving the old site’s behavior and then adding features and revising its plant records. The result, in his account, is a simpler static site that is less demanding to operate—not an independently audited performance or toxicology study.
What Plant Smart is—and why it needed a rebuild
Plant Smart began with a household question: “Can I bring this plant home without endangering the fluffy little gremlin that runs our household?” It is a searchable database intended to help people check plants for toxicity to pets. Murdoch says the original site was built with SvelteKit, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Vite and Go Magefiles. After years without maintenance, the old build no longer ran.
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The original goals still mattered: a fast static site, low operating cost and openly available data. The problem was that the implementation had become difficult to revive. Murdoch’s rebuild therefore prioritized reducing the number of moving parts he would need to remember and maintain if the project sat untouched again.
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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsWhy replace the old toolchain with Hugo?
Murdoch moved the site generation to Hugo, with a hand-written stylesheet and vanilla JavaScript. Hugo templates consume the plant database and generate both the site’s plant pages and derived API files. This lets the project produce a static site and its data outputs from the same source rather than relying on the earlier frontend build stack.
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This is a description of one project’s trade-off, not evidence that Hugo is universally better than SvelteKit or other generators. The choice fit Murdoch’s stated needs: generate static pages and data, keep operating costs low, and make the build and deployment process easier for one maintainer to resume.
How the migration protected existing behavior
Murdoch says he treated compatibility as a distinct first step, before changing the visual design or adding functionality. The first migration pass preserved the existing pages, URLs, filters, quirks and ordering. He also compared regenerated data files with the originals and found them value-identical.
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That order matters for a rebuild: it separates a change in implementation from changes in what users and downstream consumers receive. Once the old behavior and API output matched, the project could add new features without confusing migration regressions with product changes.
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What changed for visitors
After the compatibility pass, Murdoch redesigned the site around its pastel potted-plant mascot, using cream backgrounds, warm ink, green and clay accents, rounded controls and the Fredoka typeface. The rebuild also added several ways to move from a plant question to useful information:
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- Toxicity severity: visible severity labels and filters make the recorded risk level easier to find.
- Fuzzy search suggestions: search can help when a visitor does not enter a name exactly as it appears in the database.
- Symptom finder: visitors can look up plants by symptoms associated with them in the database.
- Safe-plants list: entries are included only if they appear on the ASPCA non-toxic list and are absent from Murdoch’s toxic-plant database. That is the author’s stated inclusion rule, not a guarantee of safety for every animal or circumstance.
- Common-name redirects and taxonomy: these additions connect alternate names with plant information and provide taxonomic context.
- Offline PWA support: the site can support offline use as a progressive web app.
The site also added poison-control information. In Murdoch’s post, the listed numbers were US-only, with regional localization described as a future plan. Readers outside the United States should not treat those details as locally applicable emergency guidance.
Why the plant records also needed attention
The rebuild was not limited to templates and styling. Murdoch says he consolidated duplicate or similarly named entries, reviewed symptom data, sourced taxonomy through GBIF and added toxicity principles and native-range information.
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One data rule changed to prevent a potentially misleading side effect: merging different spellings of symptoms would no longer silently promote a plant to a higher severity level. That distinction is important because data cleanup can alter conclusions if the system treats a wording change as evidence of greater toxicity.
These are descriptions of the maintainer’s dataset process, not an independent scientific validation of the toxicity classifications. A database lookup can help identify a concern, but it should not substitute for veterinary or poison-control advice when an animal may have ingested a plant.
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What the reported page-weight figures show
Murdoch attributes the original pages’ weight to repeated inline SVG assets and excess template whitespace. He says he addressed those issues with a fingerprinted, cached JavaScript bundle, SVG sprites and trimmed template whitespace. The following before-and-after figures are his reported page weights in 2026; they are not independently measured benchmarks.
| Page | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Home | 247 KB | 56 KB |
| Attributions | 238 KB | 24 KB |
| Safe plants | 270 KB | 33 KB |
| Plant page | 114 KB | 36 KB |
These figures indicate substantial reductions in the sizes Murdoch reports for those pages. They do not establish a particular improvement in load time, performance on every device, or a controlled comparison under specified network conditions.
What the rebuild means for operating the project
Murdoch moved the repository to his homelab and says the plant data remains openly available through the API. He describes the service and API as free, and says builds and deployments now run when he pushes changes. He summarizes the goal as making the project “boring to operate”—a deliberate choice for a hobby site whose maintainer’s attention can shift.
The account supports a practical lesson rather than a general ranking of tools: when a small project’s main risk is that its creator may not maintain it continuously, reducing the work required to rebuild and deploy can matter more than choosing a sophisticated stack. The available account does not independently establish whether the live site or API is currently available or what data they presently contain.
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