DEV Community: Isiah Swopes

I updated our drug profile to 563-drug harm-reduction library in 9 languages on Cloudflare's free tier — here's the stack

Isiah Swopes — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:27:56 +0000

Every year, millions of people Google things like "what does fentanyl look like" or "can you mix Xanax and alcohol" — and land on forum speculation. I built plugreports to fix that: a free harm-reduction library with 563 plain-language drug profiles, 61 mixing-danger guides, verified hotlines across nine regions, and an identification video library — in nine languages.

The interesting part (this is dev.to): the whole thing runs on Cloudflare's free tier. Here's how.

The architecture

Static generation, but with a CMS. A dependency-free Python script (build.py) reads plain data_*.py files and emits ~1,100 static HTML pages — every drug profile, guide, comparison and data page — with full JSON-LD (MedicalWebPage, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList), honest lastmod sitemaps, and real bidirectional hreflang clusters. No framework, no build step beyond python3 build.py.

A KV-backed admin CMS on Pages Functions. Static doesn't mean frozen. A PIN-protected /admin panel (HMAC-token auth against a Pages Function) edits every collection into a Cloudflare KV namespace. Pages Functions serve each route: if the slug exists as a static file it's served directly, and a small hydrate.js overlays any admin edits from KV onto the static page at runtime. Admin-created items that don't exist statically get rendered client-side. KV always wins over the seed data — reseeding never clobbers an admin edit.

Edge SEO injection. KV-rendered pages initially shipped a generic shell with <title>plugreports</title> — telling Google every dynamic page was a duplicate of the homepage. The fix was a shared _seo.js helper that strips the shell's head and injects per-item title, description, self-canonical, hreflang and OG tags at the edge, so crawlers need zero JS execution.

Machine translation via Workers AI. Nine languages × 400+ profiles would have taken months by hand. Instead, the profiles are translated in bulk through a tiny /api/translate endpoint wrapping @cf/meta/m2m100-1.2b (60 short strings per call, merged into the language packs at build time). Human review happens in the admin panel afterward — machine translation is the draft, not the final word.

Video from KV, with range streaming. Identification clips (kept under 3 MB so they load on any connection) are stored as binary KV values and served by a Pages Function that honors HTTP range requests — so HTML5 <video> scrubbing works with no R2 bucket and no video host. The homepage slider and /watch/ hub hydrate from a videos collection, so uploading a clip in the admin panel (with a "feature on homepage" checkbox) needs no rebuild.

What I'd do differently

Never batch concurrent edits to the same source file. I corrupted the generator mid-session that way (6× duplicated content, and Python's last-definition-wins masked it). Recovery was raw.githubusercontent.com + the last known-good commit. Keep your generated site in git and push often.
Cache-bust every asset pin. Cloudflare's edge caches /assets/* hard. Every JS/CSS change bumps a ?v= pin and the service-worker cache name together, or you're debugging a week-old stylesheet.
Media in KV is fine — with short cache lifetimes. Re-uploads reuse the same filename, so max-age=3600, must-revalidate instead of immutable year-long caching.

Why it matters

The traffic pattern that convinced me this was worth building: search-console data showed huge query volume around identification ("what does X look like"), mixing dangers, and quitting timelines — questions where a wrong answer can kill someone. If the site helps one person recognize an overdose sign at 3 a.m., the whole stack was worth it.

The project is live at plugreports.com — the drug library, mixing dangers, hotline directory and video library are the best starting points. Feedback and corrections are welcome via the suggestion box.

plugreports is an independent harm-reduction project. It compiles public NIDA, DEA, EMCDDA/EUDA, WHO and CDC data for education and overdose prevention — not medical or legal advice.

I built a harm-reduction drug-info site on Cloudflare's free tier — 111+ Drug profiles, 150+ pages, $0 hosting

Isiah Swopes — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 09:06:04 +0000

The problem

Someone finds a pill at a party, or a parent finds a baggie in a kid's room, or a friend overdoses at 2 AM. What do they search? "White round pill M30" or "what is tranq." The results they get are either unreadable government PDFs or 15-year-old forum threads.

I'm building plugreports.com to fix that: a visual, fast, plain-English harm-reduction library covering 111+ street drugs and pharmaceuticals — effects, overdose signs, street prices, legal status — plus drug busts, adulterant alerts, day-by-day quitting guides, and verified 24/7 hotlines for the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and Africa.

Everything is compiled from primary sources (NIDA, DEA, CDC, EMCDDA, WHO) and externally linked, because in this space, citing your sources isn't optional.

The stack (all free tier)

Static site generator in Python — content lives in typed Python dicts (data_drugs.py is literally the database schema); one build.py run emits ~160 HTML pages with JSON-LD (MedicalWebPage, FAQPage, NewsArticle), hreflang, sitemap, RSS, and an llms.txt for the AI-search era.
Cloudflare Pages + Functions — static pages for SEO speed, Pages Functions for the dynamic layer: a PIN-protected /admin CMS, a KV-backed content API, image upload/storage, and a hydration layer that overlays admin edits onto static pages in real time. New CMS entries even get instant URLs via dynamic routes.
Workers AI (m2m100) for on-demand page translation, plus a fully static /es/ batch for the SEO-heavy Spanish version.
PWA — service worker + manifest, because someone mid-crisis on bad hotel wifi still needs the hotlines page.
i18n UI in 10 languages with browser-language auto-detection.

The interesting engineering bits

Hydration over static HTML. Static pages give you Google-love; a CMS gives you instant edits. I do both: every content page loads, then fetches the KV content API and overlays the latest version. Static stays as the SEO fallback, edits go live in seconds without a rebuild.

Functions that defer to static assets. Cloudflare Pages' routing made this tricky — a dynamic route shadows static pages, and Pages serves index.html with a 200 for missing paths, so the function checks a build-time _static.json manifest before rendering anything client-side. Bogus slugs return real 404s.

Media pipeline with zero external services. Admin image uploads go to KV (with R2 auto-upgrade when bound), served through a /media/* function with immutable caching. The admin picker searches the gallery by drug name or street alias, not just filename.

Current numbers

111 substance profiles (opioids, RC benzos, cathinones, nitazenes, GLP-1 grey market…) and More to add soon
18 profiles added this week, each with FAQPage schema and agency citations
32+ real product photos served from KV
100 Lighthouse, ~200KB of JS total, TTFB ~50ms on the free tier

Why build this?

Harm reduction is one of the few domains where better information literally saves lives that night — a wrong pill doesn't care about your search results. The whole thing is open source on GitHub, and I'd genuinely love contributions: drug data corrections, new profiles (the schema is just a dict), translations.

If you've built something similar — or want to argue about KV vs D1 for this — the comments are open. 🔻