Toni MaxxMoradok Lanna case study
Moradok Lanna (มรดกล้านนา) is a free, non-profit website for the Lanna language. It grew from my father's Lanna to Thai dictionary of more than 17,000 entries into an AI teacher, a typing tool, games, a calendar and more than 200 interactive articles.
- Role
- Built and run by me, for my father's dictionary
- Stack
- PHP, relational database, vanilla JavaScript, Markdown blog
- Interface
- Thai and English
- Cost to users
- Free, no ads, no sign-up needed
My role
My father, Aj. Jaree Soontornsing, is an expert in the Lanna language and the author of the dictionary. All the Lanna knowledge on the site comes from his research. I built and run everything else: the software, the design, the servers and the daily care. The story is in the note Moradok Lanna: built for my father.
The problem
The plan was a printed dictionary book, and it was expected to take about ten years. A paper book is hard to search, hard to carry and out of reach for a new generation that lives on phones. It is also closed to people who do not read Thai.
The approach
The dictionary went online in 2018 and is free. Around it the site grew a set of tools:
- A Lanna to Thai and Thai to Lanna dictionary with more than 17,000 entries.
- An AI teacher called พ่อครู (Pho Khru) that answers only from dictionary entries, cites them and never writes Lanna script itself.
- A typing tutor and an online typing tool. You need no font. Dictionary mode lists real words as you type, and you can export the result as an image.
- A word of the day, quizzes and games, a Lanna calendar and writing boards.
- A Markdown blog with more than 200 articles in Lanna and Thai, many of them with small interactive widgets.
The Lanna script uses the LN TILOK font, created at the Center for the Promotion of Arts and Culture, Chiang Mai University.
Stack
PHP without a framework, a relational database for the dictionary, accounts and boards, vanilla JavaScript, self-hosted fonts and a flat-file Markdown blog. The AI model is called only from the server. Signing in is optional. The site's own developer notes describe the architecture in more detail.
Principles
The dictionary is the authority, so software and AI must never replace it. "Not in the dictionary" is a valid answer. The service stays free, and the AI has daily limits so that the cost stays under control.
Screens
Public pages of the live site
Every screen below is a public page of moradoklanna.com. No sign-in, no admin pages and no user content.
What is public and what is not
Public: the site, its dictionary, the stack and the developer notes. The live site is moradoklanna.com. The only traffic figure I quote is the page-hit total from the Google Analytics report, in the story note.
Not public: server details, accounts and anything about private integrations. I do not claim search rankings.
Related pages
Have knowledge worth putting online?
If you have a collection, a dictionary or a body of knowledge that people should be able to search, tell me what you have. I reply with a one-page recommendation first.
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