An Italian guide and community on caring for the bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps). The home page is its terrarium, in a photo and in 3D: every object, from the lamp to the bowls, opens its page of the guide. Inside: seven topics that start from the essentials, in-depth articles with sources, a glossary that opens in the text and a forum with categories, chosen solutions and moderation.
**PogonaItalia** is a guide, with its own community, for people who live with a bearded dragon (*Pogona vitticeps*) or are about to get one. It was born for those who today look for answers in Facebook groups, where advice contradicts itself: here the texts are original, written from the most up-to-date care guidelines and the scientific literature, and the community says the same things as the guide. The site is in Italian.
**What it does**
- **The terrarium**: the home page is a terrarium set up the way the guide asks, with the three lights overlapping on the basking spot and shade all around. Its nine objects can be clicked, and each one opens its page. The photo moves with the mouse, brings the pointed object into focus and has its own night; there is also a 3D version, and the administrator chooses which one to show. - **The guide**: seven topics that start from the essentials, in thirty seconds, with sections that open for those who want the details; eleven in-depth articles with their sources; a 40-entry glossary that explains itself inside the text; three reading paths, depending on who arrives. - **The community**: discussions by category, helpful replies, the solution chosen by whoever asked, photos, mentions, notifications in the bell and by email, reports and moderation. Until registrations open, there are 46 example discussions among 31 made-up members, each one labelled as such. - **Visit statistics** without cookies: the IP address is never stored.
**The hard part**
The photo terrarium is a single WebGL2 shader. The photo shifts with its depth map, and each pixel looks for the surface it meets along the shift: that way, with the mouse at the sides, the edges of the tank don't double. I remade the photos with ChatGPT, starting from one born from the 3D terrarium, and checked them against the guidelines: a branch reaching almost up to the UVB tube, a water bowl that was too big, a gravel floor and a thermometer showing 31.6 °C in the shade were fixed before publishing. The vertical version for phones is extended on my own computer's GPU with Z-Image-Turbo, from a sketch of wall and drawers, and the depth comes from Depth Anything V2. The day photo weighs 191 KB; the night one, 83 KB, is downloaded only when someone switches to night.
The 3D version is fully procedural, with no models to download: the bearded dragon too, with its skeleton, spines and beard made in code.
Vue 3 and TypeScript, Fastify and MongoDB, with Zod schemas shared between site and server in a pnpm monorepo, and three.js for the 3D. Every change goes through 95 automated tests and reaches the server with a GitHub Action.
Design, full-stack development and deployment · 2026
Vue.js, Fastify, MongoDB, three.js, ChatGPT