What I Asked For
The idea was a historical reference site for dirt and dual-sport motorcycles, covering all the major manufacturers from the early 1970s forward. Each brand gets its own page, and the main view is a year grid: cards arranged oldest-to-newest, three or four across, so you can scroll through a manufacturer’s entire output and see which models existed in which years at a glance. Click a year, get a modal with the lineup for that year. Click a bike, get the full detail: photo, specs, displacement, engine type, famous riders who raced or rode it.
One structural idea that shaped the whole thing from the start: store data model-centric, not year-by-year. A bike like the Honda XR250R ran from 1981 to 2004. Storing a separate record for each of those 23 years would be a maintenance nightmare. Instead, each model is one record with a year span, and the year grid is computed from that at render time. That also makes it easy to link dual-sport and off-road sister models to each other, because those relationships are just ID references between records.
The dual-sport angle mattered. A lot of what makes this space interesting is the pairing: the XR and the XL, the XT and the TT, the DR and the DR-Z. Understanding one usually means understanding the other.
What It Is
Dirt Guide is a full Next.js app deployed on Vercel, browsable at dirt-guide.vercel.app. It currently covers nine manufacturers: Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki, KTM, Husqvarna, GasGas, Beta, and Sherco, with model histories running from the late 1960s through 2026. There’s also a cross-manufacturer timeline view for seeing the whole landscape in one place.
The data structure is the part I’d build the same way again. Because each model is stored as a single record with a year span and a set of year-specific notes for major changes, adding a new manufacturer or correcting a detail means touching one record, not twenty-five. The grid view, the modal, and the timeline all derive from the same source.
It is not a forum. It is not a buying guide. It is a map. That was always the point.