Neat Finds #05: Homepages, Pocket Synths and a Server in a QR Code
Contents
- 01. HN Personal Websites Directory
- 02. BUKMARK.CLUB
- 03. ringfairy
- 04. The Repository for 88x31 Buttons
- 05. PuppyPad
- 06. mataroa
- 07. ttbp
- 08. burrow
- 09. Nexy
- 10. cozy
- 11. Kennedy
- 12. Cerca
- 13. Joker CGI Guestbook
- 14. QR-Server
- 15. Outis
- 16. WBTV
- 17. NESty
- 18. CyberCity
- 19. Jangada
- 20. esp32flight
- Bonus tabs
Issue five. Most of this batch is about places where people put their own words: directories of personal sites, a homepage host, a couple of blogging platforms, a forum, a guestbook, and servers for protocols most people have never heard of. Toward the end it gets stranger, with an NES game maker, a city made of text, a Brazilian pocket synth and a flight radar for the desk. As usual, no AI projects.
Same deal as always: I haven't tested everything here, and the last lines of each entry are what I'd be tempted to build, not promises.
01. HN Personal Websites Directory #
A community-maintained directory of personal websites by people from Hacker News, published at hnpwd.github.io together with an OPML file of all their RSS feeds. The criteria are clear: the site has to belong to one person, have a good amount of English content and be fully under the author's control, and purely AI-generated content is out. You add a site with a pull request or an issue. Importing that OPML into a feed reader gives you a lot of reading in one click.
02. BUKMARK.CLUB #
A directory of websites that keep a curated collection of bookmarks or links to other sites. That's the whole requirement for a listing. You fork the repo, add a Markdown file with your site's details, optionally with your own 88x31 button, and open a pull request. The lists on pablo.how, with pubnixes and Gemini capsules worth a visit, look like the kind of page this club collects.
03. ringfairy #
A webring generator in Rust, built like a static site generator made only for webrings. It writes plain HTML redirects, with no server code at all, so the whole ring can live on Neocities or GitHub Pages. It checks that every member site actually carries the ring's links, uses templates for everything and builds an OPML file of the members that have RSS. The trade-off is that every change means regenerating the ring, which the README says is quick. A ring for the handful of small sites I run would be an easy first test.
04. The Repository for 88x31 Buttons #
An automatically updated collection of 88x31 buttons, the tiny banners of the 2000s web. The latest sync lists 86,882 unique buttons spread over 173 gallery pages, and new ones show up on their own when a site with buttons is added to the list. Good for finding a button to link to, or for scrolling through the old web's tiny ads for an hour. phlog.space has an 88x31 button of its own, and it would be fun to see it turn up in there one day.
05. PuppyPad #
"A free old-web homepage host. Accidents welcome." Every member gets a subdomain for a static site, with a file manager, an in-browser editor, a hit counter, a guestbook and a webring link. There are four starter layouts, a style editor for colors, fonts, borders and even the cursor, and an upload option that shrinks big photos and strips their camera details. The public instance is at puppypad.org, and since the code is AGPL you can run your own, with quotas set in a config file. One of these for a small group of friends would be a good use for a spare VPS.
06. mataroa #
github.com/mataroablog/mataroa
"Naked blogging platform." Text only, with no themes, no custom CSS and no tags. Signing up takes a minute and doesn't ask for an email address, posts are Markdown, and there are no ads and no tracking. You can export the whole blog whenever you want, including as Zola or Hugo source files or as an epub, and it also mails you an export every month. The hosted version at mataroa.blog has a free plan and a paid one that adds your own domain and posting by email. The epub export is a lovely idea: a blog that becomes a book you can read on an e-reader.
07. ttbp #
The tilde.town blogging platform, a command-line hub for writing and reading blog posts on that server. You log in, type feels, and you can write your own entries and read what other residents wrote, a bit like LiveJournal living in a terminal. Each entry can go to a public page on your tilde, to tilde.town's gopher server, or stay private on the server. Something like this would sit well on runv.club.
08. burrow #
github.com/jamestomasino/burrow
A helper for building and managing a gopher hole. burrow phlog asks for a title and opens a new post in your editor, burrow gophermap lets you edit a gophermap while writing the comments in plain text, and burrow rss builds a feed of your latest phlog posts. It can also pull, commit and push your gopher folder with git, which makes it easy to run from cron. The default config points at SDF, which tells you where it grew up. For anyone keeping a phlog on a pubnix, it saves a lot of typing.
09. Nexy #
A server for the Nex protocol, written in Rust. Nex is about as small as a protocol gets: you connect, send a path, and get back a document or a directory listing. Nexy can listen on the regular internet and on networks like Yggdrasil and Mycelium at the same time, has templates for directory listings and other responses, and writes its access log in the Common Log Format, so GoAccess can read it. Soledade's reading port, 1900, already answers Nex-style requests, so Nexy is a good reference to compare against.
10. cozy #
github.com/hachiya-kurisu/cozy
"surf the small web": a terminal browser for Gemini, Spartan and Nex, written in Go. Install it with go install, run cozy, or pass an address to go straight there, like cozy nex://manatsu.town/. cozy -t day forces the day theme. The plans in the README are client certificates, maybe images in the terminal, and "aesthetics". Pointing it at Soledade over Nex is the obvious first test.
11. Kennedy #
A search engine for Gemini space, with its own crawler, backend and Gemini app server, built on ideas from the early web's crawlers and search engines. It does full-text search with stemming, suggests other queries when you get few results, understands searches like "cats AND dogs", and even searches images by their link text and paths. Try it at gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev, or through an HTTP proxy if you don't have a Gemini browser yet. With cozy from the entry above, that's a small-web setup in two programs.
12. Cerca #
"Lean forum software", written to power the Merveilles community forums. The README talks about missing the forums of the mid noughties: long discussions you visit on your own time, without being notified in the middle of something else. Threads can be public or private, invites come in one-time and multi-use batches, admin actions show up in a moderation log anyone logged in can read, and the big decisions need two admins or a week without a veto. There's RSS for new threads and posts. A small forum for the people who read this blog would be a fun experiment.
13. Joker CGI Guestbook #
github.com/dbohdan/joker-cgi-guestbook
A toy old-school CGI guestbook written in Joker, a dialect of Clojure. It's one self-contained script with the settings at the top, like CGI scripts used to have, and it keeps the entries in a Bolt database. Captchas are stateless and signed with HMAC. There's no admin page at all: to hide an entry, you open the database and add "hide": true to its JSON. It was written for the SDF Public Access UNIX System, and the author says plainly that it's a toy. phlog.space has guestbooks too, so this one is good to read side by side.
14. QR-Server #
"A Full Web Server Inside a QR Code." A Linux web server written in x86_64 assembly, with a Brotli-compressed HTML page baked into the binary, and the whole thing weighs under 3 KB and fits in a single Version 40 QR code. It comes with an extractor in Go that reads the binary back out of the image without corrupting it. The README calls it "the peak of Jank Engineering", which is fair. That QR code printed on a business card would be the strangest homepage link around.
15. Outis #
A small Go tool that answers spam with a fake "user unknown" bounce, so the sender believes your address doesn't exist. The bounce is modeled on a real Postfix one, following RFC 3464, and goes out from MAILER-DAEMON with a null sender when your server allows it. The name is Greek for "nobody", the name Odysseus gives the Cyclops. The README is honest about the limits: the message was already accepted, so it only works on senders that actually process bounces, and it's only believable when it comes from a domain you control. With your own domain and an SMTP account that can send as MAILER-DAEMON, it's a cheeky tool to keep around.
16. WBTV #
Turns your own media library into live TV. You point it at your folders and it builds the channels and an EPG-style guide by itself, using the NFO tags in your library. Then come the details that make it feel like broadcast television: retro ad breaks, station idents, "coming up next" announcements read by a voice generated offline on your own machine, and a test card for the overnight closedown. It runs in one Docker container with your media mounted read-only, and there's an Android TV app. I've written about running a 24/7 TV channel from home, so the idents and the test card are the first things I'd look at.
17. NESty #
A Bitsy-style editor for making real NES games. You draw rooms, tiles, sprites and dialogs in the browser, and NESty compiles the game to 6502 assembly, assembles it into an iNES ROM right there and lets you play-test it in an embedded emulator. You can download the .nes file for any emulator or flash cart, and the generated .asm to study. Like Bitsy, the games are about walking around, talking to people and picking things up, one screen per room, with the console's real limits checked as you go. It's live at nesy.netlify.app. A tiny game set in Soledade, with the church tower and the lit windows, would make a good first cartridge.
18. CyberCity #
github.com/MiguelCarino/CyberCity
Four walkable worlds drawn entirely in text characters: a rain-lit cyberpunk city, an 1880s frontier town, the Moon in the Apollo era and an Edo castle town on a wet evening. It's one HTML page and three small scripts, with no build step and no dependencies, and the sun goes round. All four worlds share the same engine and the same seed, so pressing 1, 2, 3 and 4 shows the same corner of the same street in four different places. The README goes deep into how each world is lit, and it's worth reading even if you never touch the code. Walk around at cybercity.carino.systems.
19. Jangada #
Alternative firmware for the M-VAVE FM-1, a pocket synth of about €70, "with a dark, industrial and Brazilian accent." Thirteen synth engines, four tracks, a modulation matrix, drones that evolve on their own, and drum kits that bring in maracatu, baião and coco, with alfaia, zabumba and cuíca. It's a fork of Felucca, and the name plays on that: a felucca is a Nile sailboat, a jangada is the Brazilian one. You can play it in the browser before flashing anything, and the README says the FM-1's boot area is never touched, so the official firmware is always one step away. Manguebeat on a pocket synth is reason enough to buy the hardware.
20. esp32flight #
github.com/theqkash/esp32flight
A desk flight radar on a single ESP32 board with a touchscreen, also available as an Android app built from the same code. It lists the aircraft around you with airline logos, routes, altitude and speed, tells you which way to look and when a plane will pass over, and has a retro CRT radar view. The data comes from free community ADS-B sources or from your own receiver on the network, and it can also show the ISS, weather balloons and ships. You install it from the browser, and the cheapest supported board costs around $15. The README currently warns that the optional FlightAware integration has a bug that burns API credits, so leave that key empty. A little screen like that by a window, watching the sky, sounds like a good weekend.
Bonus tabs #
A few more I refuse to close:
Devzat · An SSH server that drops you into a chat room instead of a shell. Try ssh devzat.hackclub.com.
Oddmuse · A wiki engine in a single Perl script, with no database.
NESFab · A programming language made just for NES games, if NESty leaves you wanting more.
photoc · Command-line tools for photographers: find blurry shots and duplicates, make contact sheets, strip GPS before sharing.
Bookshelf · A home screen for KOReader, with covers, lists or spines standing like a real bookcase.
Owly · AirDrop between iPhones and Linux, on supported Wi-Fi hardware.
dnsglobe · Watch a DNS record propagate across 34 public resolvers on a world map, in your terminal.
magick.css · A classless CSS file inspired by LaTeX and old tabletop RPG rulebooks.
That's issue five. Most of it is about places where people put their own words, and the rest makes noise or lights up a desk.
Found a strange repository, a forgotten tool or a small piece of software I should see? Send it my way. Reader suggestions are welcome for issue six. And if you make something with any of these, I'd like to see it.
Happy wandering!
Pablo