Introducing: Penny Run

I've been hard at work^{[citation needed]} putting together a website that I couldn't quite find out there already.

I'm a member of my local coin club, and while I normally prefer banknotes (pretty colours), I thought I'd give coin collecting a go as well.

I wanted to start easy - something readily available, and not expensive - and a complete date run of circulating UK coins seemed like a good idea - just pretend commemoratives don't exist for a moment!

Keeping track of this isn't easy - I used Numista to log each coin (as well as my banknotes), but it missed a slimmed-down view of my current goal.

Some apps for this kind of thing already exist:

However, they had a few problems for me:

Outdated feel: They looked like they could do with a spruce up, or felt a little busy.
Included non-circulating coinage: They included the round pound or other withdrawn coinage.
A separate database: I'll expand on this in a moment...

A Challenger Approaches

With Penny Run, I wanted to solve as many problems as I could at once.

The biggest problem I had was having a separate database of what I've collected - I primarily use Numista to catalogue my collection. I don't want to have to visit multiple places to keep my collection updated. A separate database means, if for whatever reason the site/app is removed, I lose all my progress and have to manually re-add to somewhere else.

That's what Penny Run offers over the rest - it links directly with your Numista collection. And don't worry - only the website has access to your collection. It doesn't get shared directly with me!

Feature List

A list of the features it offers are:

Interaction directly with Numista
Unique photos per coin, per year of issue - no other app has this either!
Filter grid view, sortable by year or mintage figures (where available)
Grade entry when adding/editing a coin
Private comment box for quick notes
High-level stats about your collection and progress
Clean, modern, and minimal

Technologies Used

As this is a programming blog, I've also got to expand on the tech used.

It's a NextJS 14 site, using the app router. I have to say that I am very impressed with this router over the pages router. It feels a lot more intuitive and well-thought-out. The special files are also very handy for generating the required metadata.

It's hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I get incredibly fast builds and deployments, with DDoS protection as standard, all wrapped up in a completely free package. I doubt (but do hope) that I'll ever exceed the free tier limits.

This NextJS on the edge is made possible by Cloudflare's @cloudflare/next-on-pages package. It compiles the application (including API routes!!) into Pages and Workers compatible formats.

Some other bits worth mentioning:

Images are optimised and generated via next-image-export-optimizer
UI is made with Material UI
Authentication is using Auth.js (formerly and somewhat still next-auth)
Authorization and collection editing using the Numista API
Cookie-free analytics powered by Matomo

See For Yourself

Now that you're interested, why don't you have a look at Penny Run?

More features are planned and coming each week :) - including commemoratives (soon™)