Neat Finds #02: Small Webs, Old Protocols and Other Oddities
Issue two of Neat Finds: twenty open source projects with an old soul. A search engine for the weird web, IRC servers and bouncers, BBS art on the web, feed aggregators, the code that ran Slashdot, a SimCity 2000 remake and a bird that lives in your browser.
The tabs are back. I'm not even surprised anymore. GitHub did what GitHub does.
This second batch leans old school. IRC, BBS art, feed aggregators from the 2000s, a search engine for the weird web, a Delphi web framework (more on that one later). No AI projects this time, on purpose. There's plenty of that everywhere else, and I wanted a list that smells a little more like a basement full of old computers.
Same rules as before: these aren't reviews and I haven't tested every feature. They're just things I enjoyed finding, plus whatever I'd be tempted to build with them.
01. Marginalia Search #
github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch
A search engine for the small, old and weird web, the part that big search engines bury under shopping results. The goal is to surface the human, non-commercial side of the internet, and to do it on affordable hardware instead of a datacenter. You can use the public instance at search.marginalia.nu or run your own copy over data you crawl yourself. Searching there usually ends with you three personal websites deep, having completely forgotten what you were looking for.
02. 1MB Club #
github.com/bradleytaunt/1mb-club
An exclusive members-only club for web pages that weigh less than one megabyte. Submissions arrive as git patches by email and get reviewed by hand, which is about as far from a growth strategy as you can get. Run your own homepage through a page weight checker before you open this. It might hurt.
03. Agregore #
github.com/AgregoreWeb/agregore-browser
A minimal browser for the distributed web. It speaks peer-to-peer protocols like IPFS and Hypercore right in the address bar, so a website can live on the computers of the people reading it instead of on one server. I'd love to try publishing a tiny zine this way, just to see how many friends it takes to keep it alive.
04. rw.rs #
"An experimental software community with a 199X aesthetic." You join by opening a pull request with your public SSH key, and you get a shell account and a home page at rw.rs/~you. I have a soft spot for every pubnix on earth, and this one's sign-up process is a small work of art.
05. Nomad Network #
Off-grid mesh communication with strong encryption and no accounts at all. It's built on Reticulum, which means it doesn't need the internet, or even an IP network: it runs over packet radio, LoRa, or a plain serial cable. Messages, pages, small communities, all on infrastructure owned by the people using it. Suddenly a LoRa node on the roof sounds like a perfectly reasonable purchase.
06. soju #
An IRC bouncer: it stays connected to your networks while you're away and plays back what you missed when you come back. Multiple users, lots of IRCv3, chat history. If you were on IRC in the 2000s, you remember leaving a PC on overnight just to keep a nick online. This is the grown-up version of that.
07. Ergo #
A modern IRC server written in Go that bundles the daemon, the services (NickServ, ChanServ, HostServ) and bouncer features into one program with one YAML config. Setting up an IRC network used to mean three different pieces of software and a weekend. There's a public test server at testnet.ergo.chat if you just want to poke at it. Pair it with soju and you have a whole little network for your friends.
08. ttyd #
Share any terminal program over the web. You run ttyd with a command and anyone with the link gets that program in their browser, with file transfers over ZMODEM, Sixel images and TLS. Put a text adventure behind it and you have an arcade cabinet with a URL. Just don't put a real shell on the open internet without a password, please.
09. stws #
SyncTERM, the classic BBS terminal, running in a browser tab, full screen, from a single Docker container. It even brings a Telnet BBS guide and lets you grab files you downloaded from boards. Visiting BBSes from a phone at lunch feels slightly illegal in the best way. The default password is literally syncterm, so change it before anything else.
10. AnsiLove.js #
github.com/ansilove/ansilove.js
Renders artscene files (ANSi, PCBoard, BiNARY, XBiN and friends) directly on a web page, in the browser, with SAUCE metadata. All those .ANS files from old art packs can finally live on a normal website without screenshots. A small gallery of BBS-era art, each piece with its author and date, would be a lovely weekend project.
11. html2rss #
Turns websites without feeds into RSS, using CSS selectors or its own auto-detection. There's a web app version you can run with Docker and a directory of ready-made feeds. Every site that "forgot" to publish a feed is a site I'll forget to visit, so this one fixes a real problem for me.
12. Feedr #
A terminal RSS reader in Rust. Paste any page and it finds the feed for you, sort things into categories, star articles, filter by age or author. It has two themes, a dark cyberpunk one and a light "zen" one, and you swap between them by pressing t. Reading the news without a single image or ad is weirdly calming.
13. Planet Venus #
The old Planet feed aggregator: it reads a bunch of feeds and merges them into one "river of news," then writes the result as static files with whatever templates you like. A lot of open source communities used planets like this to read each other's blogs. It's old code, so expect some archaeology to run it today. I still think a planet for small personal sites is a better idea than another social network.
14. Shaarli #
A personal bookmarking service: single user, very fast, no database. You save a link with a note and it becomes part of a public (or private) link log, with tags and an RSS feed. There's a demo instance that resets daily if you want to try it before installing anything. Old idea, still the right one.
15. Slash #
The code that ran Slashdot. Perl, Apache and mod_perl, with stories, polls and those famously long threaded discussions. Nobody needs to deploy this in 2026, and that's exactly why I like having it around. Reading it is like visiting the engine room of the early 2000s internet.
16. xxm #
Dynamic websites written in Delphi, with Pascal and HTML mixed in the same source files, compiled into a module that runs under IIS, Apache, a standalone server or even plain old CGI. My first program ever was a button in Delphi that changed the color of a window, so finding this felt personal. Some day I'll write a guestbook with it, purely out of spite.
17. OpenSC2K #
github.com/nicholas-ochoa/OpenSC2K
An open source remake of SimCity 2000, built with Rust and Godot, with packages for Windows, Linux and macOS. The original ate a lot of weekends back in the day. This one is ready to eat a few more.
18. city-roads #
Type the name of a city and it draws every single road in it at once, with data from OpenStreetMap. Big cities turn into something like a fingerprint, and you can export the result. I want a print of my hometown on the wall. There's also a scripting side for people who want to go further.
19. ntsc-rs #
A video effect that emulates NTSC and VHS artifacts, as a standalone app or as a plugin for After Effects, Premiere and OpenFX hosts. If you've seen the effects on phlog.space, you know I have a weakness for this exact kind of ugly. This one does it properly, with color bleeding and tape wobble.
20. Pocket Bird #
github.com/IdreesInc/Pocket-Bird
A tiny pixel-art bird that hops around your browser while you work. You catch falling feathers to unlock more than thirty species, dress it in hats and leave sticky notes on pages. It works in Chrome, Firefox, Tampermonkey, and there's even an Obsidian plugin. Completely useless, and I want it on every computer I own.
Bonus tabs #
A few more I refuse to close:
Ventoy · Copy ISO files to a USB stick and boot any of them. One pen drive, every installer.
ShredOS · A tiny bootable system that wipes disks for real before you sell or toss them.
Gitleaks · Finds passwords and keys you committed by accident. Run it before someone else does.
KCC · Converts comics and manga into files that look good on e-readers.
Readest · A modern, cross-platform ebook reader with a clean reading view.
Markpad · The Notepad of Markdown. Opens fast, does one thing.
theme.park · Themes for about fifty self-hosted apps, so your homelab finally matches.
linkding · A minimal, fast self-hosted bookmark manager, if Shaarli feels too old school.
That's issue two. If this list has a theme, it's that the old internet never really left. It moved into small repositories, and somebody still keeps the lights on.
Found a strange repository, a forgotten tool, or a tiny piece of software I should see? Send it my way. Reader suggestions are very welcome for issue three. And if you build something with any of these, show me. Those are still my favorite links to open.
Happy wandering!
Pablo