I wanted somewhere to share my creative writing without it bleeding into my software development work. Visitors can see story titles but can't read them, there's a lock icon and a gate message telling them to reach out if they want access.
When someone asks, I generate a single-use token link via an admin API. Click the link and the token auto-redeems: it gets atomically burned (so they can't be reused), creates a 30-day grant in Redis, and sets a secure HTTP-only session cookie. Grants can be revoked via an admin API. Might be overkill but I enjoyed building this out.