liftingstones.org

liftingstones.org is a site documenting lifting stones, their history, and the culture surrounding them.

liftingstones.org is my favourite project. Maybe that’s because I built it exclusively for myself.

I had spent a bunch of time researching historic lifting stones whilst planning a trip to Scotland, but I noticed that there wasn’t really any concise resources. If you wanted to find the locations of the stones, you had to be lucky to stumble on a document with maybe a dozen or so coordinates for the most popular stones — although it’s really not that surprising considering how niche the topic is.

So I started compiling the information and resources that I did find, and I built a repository that I could refer back to.

I built myself a map of the stone locations — again, just because I wanted it for myself to plan my trip.

After putting in the work of researching and compiling all of this information about the stones I decided it would be good to share it with people. I bought the domain (I chose a .org because I wanted it to be more like a wiki I guess) and put the map online.

Interestingly, liftingstones.org was one of the first websites that I built myself. I had never really been into web development stuff, so it was pretty fun to branch out and do something new. In hindsight the original site was bad.

The site was pretty bare-bones to begin with. Which gave me the idea of writing some articles — ones that were much more accessible that the stuff before it. I posted an edited-down version of each article to Instagram where they resonated with the small community. The site and the Instagram page grew nicely over a few months where I posted regularly.

I continued researching stones and uncovered ones that were previously unknown to the community — stones in places like the Faroe Islands, Norway, and Japan.

In January 2022, I launched a completely re-designed, ground-up rebuild of the site after a few months of dormancy. Then I started a monthly (ish) newsletter, alongside new articles published in that same cadence.

Traffic to the site gradually grows each month, and it ranks very well for relevant keywords.

Status: ✅