Personal projects

Stuff I made
because I wanted it to exist

Neither of these has to convert anybody. No funnel, no quarterly number, nobody upstairs asking what the traffic did last week. That’s the small web, minus the nostalgia, and it’s why there’s no account to make here and nothing a few screens in that wants your email address. There’s a visitor counter, because I’m nosy. That’s the extent of what either of them knows about you.

Live · Feb 2026

WikiCommute

Tell it how many minutes you have. It builds a Wikipedia rabbithole that fits, in one continuous scroll.

Open WikiCommute →Read the coverage ↓
WikiCommute in dark mode, with a completed ten-minute reading path and its first Wikipedia article.
  • 2,300 readers in its first month
  • About 6,000 readers since launch
  • Written about in 6 languages
  • Works in 15
Live · Nov 2025

Spotless

Pick what you spilled and what you spilled it on. Get the fix, with the chemistry behind it and the mistakes to avoid. Seventeen stains across four fabrics.

Open Spotless →Read the coverage ↓
Spotless with Coffee / Tea and Cotton selected, showing the first stain-removal steps.
  • 39,000+ visits
  • Still about 54 a day
  • Reviewed in a national newspaper
  • Built in one day
Out in the world

Written elsewhere

Both tools were shared once on Reddit, with no paid promotion or press outreach. The coverage followed by word of mouth. Quotations keep their original wording; omissions are marked.

WikiCommute

“Seeing a lot of stuff built on Wikipedia at the moment, which is honestly very pleasing (it might also remind people that it’s a public good worth contributing to, financially if not temporally, because, well, it is!) – this is the latest iteration, a smart little toy which, if you give it the amount of time you’re going to be commuting for, will provide you with an Interesting Selection Of Wikipedia Bits to read, which should fit perfectly(ish) to the duration of your journey. So if rather than scrolling endlessly through Reels or placing your soul through the meatgrinder that is ‘the news’, why not instead let this take you on a fun (if seemingly entirely disconnected) selection of WikiRabbitholes.”

“I have long thought that ‘temporally-limited experiences based on journey length’ is an underexplored area of digital creativity, and this has reminded me of that (and why it is still true).”

Matt Muir · Web Curios, 13 Feb 2026 Matt Muir writes Web Curios, a long-running weekly collection of internet finds. His second paragraph considers what other experiences could be built around journey length.
More on WikiCommute 5 sources

“WIKIPEIA WHILST DRIVING – This site asks how much time you have to waste, and will build a Wikipedia rabbit hole with that approximate reading time for you to waste it in. Would be a good thing to replace any bottomless scroll with a specified time, really. Instead of deliberately making people addicts.”

b3ta newsletter, issue 980 A British web-culture newsletter running since the early 2000s. The headline typo is theirs. So is the joke about driving.

“Tell it how long your commute is and it builds a Wikipedia rabbit hole sized to fit. One continuous scroll instead of twenty tabs you’ll abandon at your stop. There’s a ‘Surprise Me’ mode and fifteen languages, and it cites its CC BY-SA source like a good citizen. Whether the chain actually reads as one story or just vaguely adjacent topics is the part I haven’t tested, but time-boxing the spiral instead of fighting it is a neat inversion.”

Matthew Culnane · matthewculnane.co.uk, 2 June 2026 A personal blog of links and reading notes. Culnane questioned the coherence of the reading path, the same issue I later rebuilt.

“Yolculuk süreni giriyorsun, araç sana tam o süreye uygun uzunlukta Wikipedia makaleleri öneriyor. Reels kaydırmak yerine işe/okula giderken okunabilir, süreye göre ayarlanmış bir ‘mini okuma listesi’ sunumu.”

You enter your journey time and it suggests Wikipedia articles exactly that long. Instead of scrolling Reels on the way to work or school, a mini reading list tuned to the time you have.

Çağsı · @bild on BlueskyTR A Turkish-language recommendation from Çağsı, who posts as @bild on Bluesky.

“Hand aufs Herz: Wie oft scrollen Sie auf dem Arbeitsweg durch Feeds, ohne hinterher etwas behalten zu haben? WikiCommute dreht dieses Muster um und macht aus toter Pendelzeit eine geschlossene Leseeinheit.”

“Klassische Wikipedia-Sessions enden im Klick-Labyrinth: Ein Artikel führt zum nächsten, und nach zwanzig Minuten landen Sie bei einem Thema, das mit dem Start nichts mehr zu tun hat. WikiCommute setzt davor eine Zeitgrenze.”

Hand on heart: how often do you scroll feeds on the way to work without retaining anything? WikiCommute reverses that and turns dead commuting time into a self-contained reading unit. Classic Wikipedia sessions end in a click-labyrinth, one article leading to the next until after twenty minutes you land on something with nothing to do with where you started. WikiCommute puts a time limit in front of that.

Markus Seyfferth · Dr. Web, 3 June 2026DE A full article in Dr. Web, a German web-industry magazine, published four months after launch.

“WikiCommute for tailored Wikipedia reading paths based on how much time you have.”

Sangmin Simon Oh · personal resources page Assistant Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School. WikiCommute appears in his collection of recommended resources.

Krautreporter sent more readers than every Reddit link combined. The tool also appeared in Stephanie Walter’s Pixels of the Week, Sidebar and Dense Discovery. A French write-up credited medianes.org for finding it first; Portuguese and Spanish mentions followed too.

Spotless

“Spotless is a simple one-page website that helps you get rid of various everyday stains that you get on your clothing or any fabric around the house. As you open the site, you notice Spotless written at the top, and right under it, a little tagline that says, ‘Don’t panic. Don’t rub. Just fix it.’ This one line tells you everything.”

“So, given the nature of the site, you won’t find any traditional menu as you’d see on most websites. Instead, the whole ‘navigation’ is basically the tool itself, which means the tool isn’t just a feature on the page; it is the page. There’s nothing else to explore; just select your stain and fabric and you have your answer.”

Asif Ali · Dawn, 19 March 2026 Asif Ali reviewed Spotless in Dawn, one of Pakistan’s major English-language daily newspapers, four months after launch.
More on Spotless 2 sources

“A practical tool for life’s little disasters. Select the type of stain (coffee, red wine, mustard, blood) and the fabric it’s on (cotton, silk, polyester), and Spotless gives you clear, step-by-step instructions to fix it. No ads, no tracking, just the answer to ‘how do I get this out?’”

Curiosity Saved The Cat, issue 37 A newsletter recommendation filed under “this week’s wonderfully random corner of the internet”.

“Spotless 污渍清除在线百科｜无广告无追踪的专业去渍工具”

Spotless: an online stain-removal encyclopedia. A professional stain tool with no ads and no tracking.

A姐分享 (ahhhhfs)ZH A Chinese-language tools publication covering software and open-source projects. Its Spotless write-up leads with the absence of tracking on the original Neocities version.

Other mentions include beSpacific and Sidebar, alongside Dense Discovery. A Reddit thread turned into an argument about whether canola oil is the hardest stain there is.

A useful complaint

The part I rebuilt

A reader put the problem plainly. A timed reading path needed a better connection between its articles.

“I don’t quite get it. I put in 15 min and got two completely random articles (Great Salem fire of 1914 and ISBN) that are not connected in any way. […] So why not just read a random Wiki article and follow a reference that looked interesting?”

elcaron · r/InternetIsBeautiful, Feb 2026 He was right, and two other reviewers had said a softer version of the same thing. I rebuilt the chaining in September.

FIXED, SEPT 2026. The old version picked its next article uniformly at random from every link on the page, so a country or a citation code like ISBN was as likely as the actual subject. It now scores links by where they appear in the article text and by how many articles on the path already point at them. Hub pages and citation codes are filtered out, and a dead end falls back to Wikipedia’s own similarity search instead of jumping somewhere unrelated.