Neat Finds #03: Tiny Websites, Paper Zines and Old Desktops

[37m╶── [97mgemlog[90m · 2026-11-02[0m

Issue three, and the tabs keep coming. I'm starting to think they breed when I close the laptop.

This batch is about small places. Websites that fit inside a link, a directory of personal homepages, a TV schedule for handmade sites, zines you fold from a single sheet of paper, and a pile of old desktop wallpapers that someone saved from oblivion. There's also a multiplayer role playing game ported to C in the 1980s, because of course there is. Same as last time: no AI projects.

Same rules too: these aren't reviews, I haven't tested every feature, and the ideas at the end of each one are just what I'd be tempted to build.

01\. pico

github.com/picosh/pico

A bundle of services you use entirely through SSH, with tools you already have: `scp`, `rsync`, `sftp` and `ssh`. You can host a static site with `rsync -rv ./public/ pgs.sh:/mysite/`, publish a blog post with `scp hello-world.md prose.sh:/`, expose something running on localhost with `ssh -R dev:80:localhost:8000 tuns.sh`, or send data between machines with pipes over SSH. There's also RSS-to-email and a pastebin. No web dashboard, just your terminal and your keys. And if you'd rather run it yourself, there's a guide for self-hosting in the repo.

02\. hyperuplink

github.com/hyperuplink/hyperuplink

"A super high speed internet bulletin board as single binary." It's a forum in Go that renders everything on the server and doesn't send a single line of JavaScript to the browser. The tagline on the project site says it's "Themeable Like It's 1998", and you change themes and color schemes live from the admin page. Two things to know: GitHub is only a mirror (development happens on tty.fail), and it uses its own license, not a standard open source one. A forum for a few friends, with a theme straight out of a GeoCities neighborhood, is exactly what I'd do with it.

03\. Lobsters

github.com/lobsters/lobsters

The code that runs lobste.rs, a link aggregator for computing people. It's open "as part of our commitment to transparency", and the repo keeps a list of sister sites that run their own copies. I like the details: they don't serve JavaScript to logged-out visitors, and they run on SQLite in production. The README has my favorite warning of the month, that "the hard part about starting an online community is not the codebase."

04\. Bzl

github.com/bzlapp/Bzl

A self-hosted social space where posts expire. Every post is tagged with keywords, lives for a while and then disappears, and each one has its own little chat room. Posts with active conversations float to the top, other people can give them more time, and the quiet ones fade away. It runs on Node, keeps its data in plain JSON files, and there's a launcher that sets up a Cloudflare tunnel so friends can join without touching your router. A place where nothing lasts forever sounds healthier than most social networks I know.

05\. personalsit.es

github.com/xdesro/personalsit.es

"A little directory of people's personal sites." You add yours by opening a pull request with a small YAML file: title, URL, tags and, if you have one, your feed. There are over a thousand sites in there already. The maintainers say they close obviously AI-generated pull requests, which made me like it even more. Pick a random tag and start clicking; it's the old web ring feeling, sorted by interests.

06\. itty.bitty

github.com/arfct/itty-bitty

itty.bitty takes a small HTML page, compresses it and stores the whole thing inside a URL. There's no server holding your site: the link is the site, and the browser unpacks it on the other side. Try it at itty.bitty.site. I want to make a tiny greeting card, put it in a QR code and hand it to someone on paper.

itty.bitty.site

07\. hypertext.tv

github.com/kydecker/hypertext.tv

A TV channel for the handmade web. Small games and personal sites "air" at a set day and time each week, like shows on a schedule, and everyone tunes in to the same thing at the same time. The project describes itself as "limited, unalgorithmic, collective", and anyone can submit a site. It started as a class project at the School for Poetic Computation. Watching hypertext.tv feels like flipping channels in 1995, except every channel is somebody's weird little website.

hypertext.tv

08\. zine

github.com/zserge/zine

A tiny CSS file for making one-sheet zines: eight pages from a single A4 or Letter sheet, folded, with no glue and no staples. You write a `.zine` element with eight children, and when you print, the pages are laid out in the right order and orientation for folding. There's a folding diagram in the repo and a few examples, including guides for ukulele and tin whistle. An eight-page printed version of this very newsletter is now on my list of bad ideas I will absolutely do.

09\. Simple.css

github.com/kevquirk/simple.css

A classless stylesheet: you link one CSS file and your plain HTML suddenly looks decent, without adding a single class. Headings, forms, tables, code blocks, all handled. It's perfect for the kind of site where you just want to write and not think about design for a while. A good companion for the zine above, and for every "I'll style this later" project I've ever started.

10\. omg.lol

github.com/neatnik/omg.lol

The public repository of omg.lol, the community of handy services built around a single address. Inside are the Info Center docs, the profile themes and icons, and the API schema. I have a page there, so this repo is part reference and part toy box. Making a profile theme from scratch is high on my "someday" list.

11\. Sparkles

github.com/benjifs/sparkles

A Micropub client, which means a small app that posts to your own website instead of to someone's platform. You log in with IndieAuth and write notes, and there are experimental post types for what you watched, read, listened to or played, with search for movies and games. It installs as an app on your phone and shows up in the share menu. There's a public instance at sparkles.sploot.com if you want to try it first.

sparkles.sploot.com

12\. textlog

github.com/stagas/textlog

"The quieter social microblogging platform." Short public notes of up to 500 characters, follows for people and hashtags, replies, and "no engagement tricks". You can download or delete your data whenever you want. It runs on Bun and SQLite, and you can rename it and host your own copy. The live site is textlog.cc, funded through Open Collective.

textlog.cc

13\. mood-tracker

github.com/dimdenGD/mood-tracker

A web page for tracking your mood on two axes: how pleasant you feel and how much energy you have. You click a spot to place a dot and right-click to save it. Each mood takes six bytes, and the README does the math: about 100 kB a year if you save every 20 minutes. It works offline and syncs later, and the Docker version runs on port 8228, which spells "CAT" on a phone keypad. The license is MIT with one extra condition, so read it before you reuse the code.

14\. textmode.js

github.com/humanbydefinition/textmode.js

A creative coding library for real-time ASCII and textmode graphics in the browser, built on WebGL2. It draws on a grid of characters, loads fonts and bitmap tilesets, turns images and video into glyphs, and reads mouse, keyboard, touch and even gamepads. There's a live editor at editor.textmode.art where you can play without installing anything. One honest note: the repo only holds the built library, and the source code lives in a private repository.

editor.textmode.art

15\. Blocktronics artpacks

github.com/blocktronics/artpacks

Every artpack released by Blocktronics, the ANSI and ASCII art group, in one repository: ACiD Trip, Blocktober, Space Invaders, Year of the Block and more. It's pure art, in CP437, PETSCII and friends. Pair it with AnsiLove.js from the last issue and you have the start of a proper gallery. There's no license file, so treat it as something to admire and link to, not to repackage.

16\. Scepter of Goth

github.com/shelches/scepter

Scepter of Goth, also known as Milieu, is an old multi-user role playing game. This version was ported from Pascal to C in the mid-1980s and was designed to run on QNX. Spells, monsters, rooms, all in a handful of C files. I have no idea if it builds on a modern system, and the README doesn't promise anything.

17\. Sierra Death Generator

github.com/foone/SierraDeathGenerator

Makes fake "GAME OVER" and "YOU DIED" screens in the style of Sierra's old adventure games, plus screenshots from a long list of other games. You type your text, pick a game and get a screen that looks like it came straight out of it. It still gets updates (the latest added word wrap to Police Quest 2). Play with it at deathgenerator.com. Warning: you'll make one for every minor tragedy of your week.

deathgenerator.com

18\. sys42

github.com/windows93dotnet/sys42

The toolkit that grew out of cleaning up the code of Windows 93, the parody operating system that runs in your browser. The goal was "something close to GTK/Qt for HTML": desktop-like apps with windows, where each app runs in its own iframe. It avoids bundlers on purpose so "View page source" stays readable, and the README promises it's "Totally suitable for use in production. Trust me... im a dolphin." It was archived in April 2026, so this is a museum piece now, but a fun one to read.

19\. Classic Tiled Wallpaper Challenge

github.com/peteroupc/classic-wallpaper

A challenge to make new open source desktop wallpapers the old way: small tiles, from 8×8 to 256×256 pixels, with limited color palettes. Entries should be public domain or close to it, and the rules say they must be "not produced by artificial-intelligence tools". The repo also has Python tools to generate patterns and long documents about traditional UI graphics, like the 8×8, two-color desktop patterns of Windows 3.1 and 95. I want to make one tile for my own desktop and stare at it for a week.

20\. tiles-and-such

github.com/wallace-aph/tiles-and-such

"A raw dump of all of my collected tiled/retro images." Over 7,600 files, organized by where they came from: Solaris and CDE, Mac OS 7 to 9, Windows tiles, retro patterns and more, much of it from John Duncan's old archives. It hasn't changed since 2018 and doesn't need to. Put one of these behind a Simple.css site for an instant nineties look.

Bonus tabs

A few more I refuse to close:

Stirling-PDF · A self-hosted PDF editing platform you run with one Docker command, in over 40 languages.

Stirling-PDF

ILSpy · An open source, cross-platform .NET decompiler, for when you need to know what a program is really doing.

ILSpy

Pake · Turns any website into a small desktop app with one command, much lighter than Electron.

Pake

OpenList · A community fork of AList that shows files from local disks, WebDAV, OneDrive and other storage in one web interface.

OpenList

Real-World Onion Sites · A list of mainstream sites that also offer a Tor onion address.

Real-World Onion Sites

Technicolor · Old Paint.NET plugins that imitate two-strip and three-strip Technicolor film. Archived, but the before-and-after frames are lovely.

Technicolor

That's issue three. If this one has a theme, it's that a website doesn't need to be big to be a place, whether it's a link, a sheet of paper or a forum for twelve people.

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 four. And if you build something with any of these, show me. Those are still my favorite links to open.

Happy wandering!

Pablo

[37m──╴ [90mend of transmission[0m

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