The Fly Trap:a restaurant website that updates itself from Toast.
The Fly Trap has served breakfast and lunch on Woodward Avenue in Ferndale since 2004. Its website reads the menu and the weekly specials straight from the restaurant’s Toast POS every 15 minutes. When the kitchen changes a dish or adds a special in Toast, the website shows it within the quarter hour, photos included, and nobody touches the site.
- Business
- Restaurant · Ferndale, MI
- Status
- Live, and I still maintain it
- Website
- theflytrapferndale.com
What The Fly Trap needed
Restaurant menus change constantly, and the website is usually the last place anyone remembers to update. A stale online menu sends people in for dishes that are gone, and Google and AI assistants repeat whatever the website says. The Fly Trap already kept its real menu in Toast for ordering, so typing it into a website a second time was duplicate work that never stayed current.
What I built for The Fly Trap
- 01
Menu synced from Toast
A scheduled job reads the full standing menu from the Toast API every 15 minutes and publishes it to the site. Dish names, descriptions and vegetarian markers match what the register has.
- 02
Weekly specials, with photos
Specials, the soup of the day and their photos come from Toast too. Add a special at the register and it appears on the homepage.
- 03
Fails safe
If Toast is unreachable or sends back something unexpected, the site keeps the last good menu. It never goes blank.
- 04
Facts search engines can read
Restaurant structured data carries the address, hours, phone and cuisine, so search engines and AI assistants read them from the source instead of guessing.
- 05
Ordering stays on Toast
Takeout orders go to the restaurant’s existing Toast online ordering, so there is no second system to run.
Built with
- React
- Toast API
- GitHub Actions
- GitHub Pages
Related services
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