u/RuiAzores

One thing people don’t tell you before visiting São Miguel:

Your weather app is basically a lottery ticket 😂

You can wake up with blue skies, get hit by heavy rain 20 minutes later, then somehow end the day in a hot spring while steam rises around you like a damn movie scene.

And honestly? Rain here does NOT automatically ruin your trip.

Some of my favorite rainy-day things in São Miguel are actually:

• hot springs
• tea factories
• lava caves
• cozy food spots
• museums
• random cafés with terrible weather outside and good pastries inside

I ended up writing a small no-BS guide with ideas for rainy days in São Miguel, especially for people panicking because their forecast suddenly turned gray:

https://azoresbyrui.com/blog/what-to-do-in-sao-miguel-when-it-rains-local-tips-that-actually-help

And yes, if you’re going to the hot springs while it rains:
bring a plastic bag for your stuff.
Local survival tip 😅

Also, if you know other good rainy-day things to do in São Miguel, let me know. I’m always curious to discover more local spots and ideas myself. 👍

Hey everyone, just wanted to share my project: https://island-trusted-picks.lovable.app/

It’s a local travel/review website about São Miguel Island in the Azores, built entirely inside Lovable over the last ~4 months.

The project became WAY bigger than I originally expected for what was supposed to be “just a review blog”. Right now it has:

- tons of categories and internal linking

- advanced search

- user accounts

- comments

- saved places

- AI-powered “Plan My Trip” itinerary builder

- SEO health/audit system

- automatic social media posting to Facebook + Instagram whenever I publish new content

- content health monitoring

- smoke tests / QA audits

- image optimization pipeline

- structured SEO metadata system

- admin dashboard tools

- etc

The “Plan My Trip” feature is probably the most complex thing. Users answer a few questions like travel style, pace, interests, duration, restaurants vs nature vs hidden spots, and the system generates a custom day-by-day itinerary based on my own database/content.

As a designer (not a full-time developer), Lovable honestly changed what I thought was possible for someone like me to build alone.

That said, after 4 months using it heavily, here’s my honest feedback.

The biggest lesson I learned VERY quickly:

using ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini to THINK before prompting Lovable makes a massive difference.

At the beginning I was just prompting directly inside Lovable and wasting a ton of credits because I didn’t fully understand the architecture or implications of changes.

Now my workflow is more like:

- think/problem solve with ChatGPT

- ask it to generate/refine the implementation prompt

- only then send the final prompt to Lovable

Night and day difference.

Once the project gets bigger, complexity increases FAST. Bugs also start appearing more often, but honestly I think that’s natural once you move beyond simple CRUD apps.

At some point I had to build an entire “system health” layer because I got tired of random regressions:

- smoke tests

- QA audits

- content health checks

- broken link detection

- SEO validation

- duplicate metadata detection

- image validation

- schema validation

- etc

Without that, fixing one thing sometimes broke three others.

My biggest struggle by FAR has been SEO.

Not basic SEO stuff. Lovable handles a lot of that fine.

I mean large-scale indexing + prerendering + crawler behavior + canonical consistency + bot rendering + metadata duplication + dynamic OG generation + sitemap consistency + crawlability.

I’ve probably spent more time on SEO infrastructure than actual UI at this point 😂

Right now I’m using lovablehtml.com which helped a lot, but I’m still fighting indexing issues because a huge percentage of my pages still aren’t indexed.

Things I’ve implemented/tried:

- canonical cleanup

- metadata cleanup

- dynamic meta tags

- structured data / JSON-LD

- Open Graph optimization

- Twitter cards

- sitemap improvements

- robots cleanup

- image optimization

- prerender validation

- duplicate tag cleanup

- internal linking improvements

- crawlability audits

- Cloudflare caching tweaks

- prerendered HTML generation for bots

- etc

I also tried building a Cloudflare Worker-based SEO/prerender solution myself with help from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Lovable… and honestly I never fully got it working correctly.

Then I even explored exporting to Vercel to use proper SSR/middleware approaches, but that would basically require separating the admin/backend from the frontend, which kind of defeats one of the biggest advantages of Lovable for me: speed and simplicity.

So right now I’m still balancing:

“keep the Lovable magic”

vs

“full custom SEO infrastructure”

Overall though? I’m honestly impressed with what’s possible now.

4 months ago I would NEVER have believed I could build something at this scale mostly solo.

Curious if other people building bigger Lovable projects are hitting similar SEO/scaling problems once the app grows beyond the “simple startup MVP” phase.