Ideas List

This is the page where I write some ideas I have. My ideas cover software, design, technology, and more.

There are more ideas on this page than I have time to work on. If you see one that you, too, would like to exist, please feel free to make it!

Software

  • inspiringdesigns.guide: A feed of web design examples I like.
  • A minimal PWA that shows when the sun will rise and set.
  • streetpass.social but for personal websites.
  • A browser extension that lists all rel=alternates on a web page (maybe all rel= tags?)
  • Finish disinfo-domains
  • A Wikipedia bot that finds article titles that rhyme with the names of Taylor Swift songs
  • Browser extension to open Amazon links, Google Books links, on the Open Library
  • recycle.org should have a PWA
  • Cable inventory management system
    • Image recognition to tell you what type of cable something is
  • A PWA that chooses a random coffee brewer from your collection that you should use to brew your next cup of coffee
  • A minimal UI for the IndieWeb wiki
  • A web extension that lets you see backlinks to pages on your website
  • An automated link bot that recommends links that could be added to an IndieWeb wiki page
  • A browser extension that highlights bi-directional links
  • App to tell you where the nearest bin is. Use OpenStreetMap.
  • Statically-generated rhyming dictionary site.
  • A browser extension to get all the external links on a web page. Would be great for HWC notes.
  • An image map maker
  • Mood board maker
  • A printed booklet with select articles from my website
  • Principles of the web interview series: Document the history of the web and its values from people who play/played a significant role in its development.
  • Writing series — like humans of New York.
  • Single-user #ootd fashion app.
  • I need a better admin interface for emojis on my website.
  • Impressionist painting of the day RSS feed
  • Image reader inspired by the principles of Artemis: minimal, focused.
  • Coffee web planet — a place where you can share photos of coffee.
  • Kind cards — leave a kind message for someone.
  • HTML sitemap visualiser tool; use details/summary tags.
  • A tool that lets you make a daily-updating RSS feed.
  • An app that lets you follow museums for new exhibitions
  • Guggenheim blog RSS feed
  • Interactive rss feed maker?
  • Browser extension to show all headings on a page
  • A PWA for learning logic fundamentals
  • TinyPoll — minimal polling tool.
  • 88x31 button search engine
  • Wikipedia album release project
  • Logical fallacy flash cards
  • Wiki for my local area
  • A TODO list app that only lets you have three items on it at once — the potential of limits in application design.
  • History of the web daily trivia
  • Shazam for bird song
  • h-feed to OPML
  • An interactive tool for editing MediaWiki tables.
  • Web poll web component
    • like my coffee poll tool
  • HTML element definition matching game, like Duolingo’s word match.
  • IndieWeb wiki archive bot to fix broken links
  • a URL pattern for proposing typo fixes on a web page
    • ?t=coftee[1]&r=coffee, where [1] is the index of the instance on the page, could also be [a] for all.
  • A spellcheck trained to recognise developer keywords like function names and language keywords.
  • CSS Carnival (inspired by the IndieWeb)
  • A static site redirect manager
  • A podcast of people reading blog posts, perhaps curated around a theme
  • Publish an RSS feed of the BBC Your Pictures in Scotland feed
  • A bookmarklet / browser extension for Share Openly
  • A note-taking tool with an easy way to attribute quotes to speakers
    • Maybe a microsyntax that lets you automatically write who said something
    • Ideal for live note-taking, especially in person
  • A HWC blogroll
  • A simple coffee logging application
  • IndieWeb wiki page of the day RSS feed (prioritise more full pages rather than stubs)
  • NFC sticker for my website on my phone case
    • I could use this at events to let people easily find my website
  • Site search discovery (how could rel=search + HTML search elements be used to discover which sites have search?)
  • A tool to make web pages that turn inputs into front matter, in the same style as my create page
  • Link graph query language
  • A physical dial that lets you change semantic embedding maps like this one to vary the degree of similarity or difference
  • A tiny sticker book where you collect physical 88x31 buttons from someone's website
  • Better tooling to assemble tutorials on a blog that are made from reusable components
  • An external DNS monitoring tool that uses dig rather than being platform-specific
  • A PWA for smallseasons.guide
  • Oblique Strategies but for rhetoric and coming up with more robust arguments
  • Indie web fan listing
  • One idea a day community app
    • Blank box to write an idea
    • See your friends' ideas at the end of the day
  • A game that shows line with two concepts and a random point chosen between.
    • The challenge: come up with an idea that matches where the point is on the spectrum.
  • Game: List 10 uses for a randomly-selected object.
  • A /html-elements page that lists all of the unique HTML elements I have used on this website.
  • A website that documents RSS feed patterns for popular websites
  • A tool that turns a Notion document into a HTML page with timestamps for the time / date at which every note was written
    • Create a day-by-day view of your Notion (like a daily journal!)
  • “coffees of edinburgh” blog post series
  • A coffee news aggregator
  • rel=blogroll
  • A web page where everyone can control different sections, but where you can only update the contents once per day; an edit history would be recorded to show how the page evolved over time.
  • Static, local web page that shows commands you use a lot in your terminal, with an easy copy-to-clipboard functionality.
  • Log cron outputs to a static file and make a status dashboard that shows the state of all cron jobs
  • A website only available on sundays
  • A weekly roundup of bookmarks, like This Week in the IndieWeb but for bookmarks
  • A waffle iron that makes waffles in the shape of a palm tree
  • A tool that lets you set how many emails you want to respond to before you make a(nother) cup of coffee
  • What would a screenshot search engine look like?
  • Bookmarklet that lets me start an email to respond to someone’s blog post?
  • What about a piano version of a collaborative grid like the one on aaronpk.com?
  • mf2toCSV — ideal for taking HTML site maps and turning them into CSV files.
    • this could be a generic parser that turns all attributes into a CSV file.
  • A website sound board (a la radio). I would want a coffee brewing sound.
  • Tool that turns Notion export into pretty static website.
    • Pattern: Tools that turn exports into more usable formats.
  • A directory of low-sugar dessert recipes
  • Best airline coffee website: A crowdsourced list of the best available airline coffee.
  • A physical button to press to track art you liked in a museum
    • I would much prefer this to taking my phone out to capture a photo of both the artwork and its corresponding plaque.
  • Semantic tool to keep documentation screenshots from drifting
  • OSS leaderboard
  • Baseball projection diagram — use homography mapping.
  • Draw a piano vision idea
  • Cloud classification app
  • Version of library.jamesg But for art
    • painting name
    • Artist
    • Photo
    • Gallery seen in
  • Product Hunt but for things that haven't launched; a place to chat about ideas. Use tags like /web as filters / ways to stay focused on your interests.
  • MediaWiki MCP support
  • Mobile app to run compute jobs on a home server.
  • edinburgh / tech events [dot] com
  • Dating app without pictures? Or only show pictures after matching.
  • Competition for the best alt text on an image. (open question: how could this be judged?)
  • Cable inventory app -- use classifier to help with data ingestion
  • A browser extension that, when clicked, opens a “chat” channel to talk about a web page, to which you can invite friends.
  • Idea: An intuitive sceenshot search and exploration tool. Screenshots could be grouped by embedding and temporally — embeddings create clear semantic cut offs. You could then create a timeline view that lists your screenshot groups.
    • observation: I usually take several screenshots at once for something.
    • Could sole screenshots be grouped together — for example sole ones may be group pictures.
  • Using embeddings as a semantic fuzzy matcher — provide list of headings, find the most related one.
  • A tool to make collection experiences easily — could be structured as nosql with a single “record” that has a “type” so you can filter easily by type.
    • it would be great to have one platform I could customise for paintings, books, coffee, and more.
    • This could plug into a spreadsheet and automatically figure out the data structure, what fields to allow for searching / filtering, etc.
  • Swifties webring
  • Tool that, given pasted data, tells you who is closest to a number — useful for Zoom trivia.
  • App that lists all the artists a singer has collaborated with, and all the people that collaborated with them.
  • HN without AI/LLMs
  • Automatic coffee doser for hand grinders
  • Coffee radar: A site that checks popular coffee roasters for coffees that match your tastes / coffees you want to try
  • IndieWeb Search Engine v2
  • bookmarklet [dot] town — share your bookmarklets.
  • rss browser extension
    • /subscriptions.json — map of feed URL to the author management page
      • would let a user manage a subscription with one click from the browser
      • turn icon green if user has subscribed to a feed on the page?
      • Update my code to use TXT
  • HTML templates for physical flyers
  • sunset — a macos menu bar app that reminds you when the sun is about to set
  • Text Stories, like https://playground.jamesg.blog/stories.html
  • Idea for open source software: demo videos for installation
  • A website styled like a 3DS
  • Browser extension that lets you copy all open tabs to your clipboard
  • IndieWeb Starter Kits
  • link to line number in rel=edit
  • breakfast and coffee could be a site to share stories from breakfasts, leaning toward the memorable.
  • "Go make a web page!" t-shirt
  • “Inspect openly” — for listing debug tools.
  • “the web is yours" sticker
  • site template dependency mapper
  • technical writing meetup online
  • indieweb community-hosted instances of software, like an instance of WriteBook
  • technical writing consulting; reach out to hr leaders with a one-pager?
  • show the path of an image below the image, then click to open in github
  • I could use #:~:text=writing to highlight text to change on a page if I have already highlighted text
  • https://markwhen.com/ HTML parser — return a HTML table!
  • mf2-only syntax highlighter.
  • Taylor Swift site monitor that updates an RSS feed whenever the site changes so I know the site changed
  • Difficulty: managing multiple email threads from the same person.
  • An extension that opens a side tray with an editable section for a web page. The tray should integrate with a text area on the page so that the user sees a live edit interface.
  • Tap NFC on my phone, which takes you to a secret url like /nfc/[url]. You then get a custom emoji when you browse my site to indicate you have visited me in person.
  • a page that lists all python functions in a folder
  • a television remote but all the buttons are html elements
  • a piano where every key is a html element
  • "web scrapbook"
  • bearblog.dev/discover but for all personal blogs?
  • A game about making websites — drag and drop a navigation bar, sidebar, etc. from several options.
  • An IndieWeb market website that curates indie makers who are selling things
  • “send to a friend” bookmarklet to send an article you enjoyed to a friend
  • A web tutorial that is side-by-side code and visual
  • A web extension that lets you hover over an element and see its source code?
  • Keyboard transposer that fixes typos when your hands are positioned one-key-off from where they should be when typing
  • A personal website trail, like a museum trail?
  • url.town but for everyone (no omg.lol subscription needed)
  • Bot of the day maker
  • “tech tips” site that helps you make user-friendly choices on the web
  • rel=support — a way that rss readers could offer a “support” button? (maybe with an “i already support {service}” option too)
  • long-form writing news aggregator
  • I wish there was a web-first calendar scheduling tool. Maybe this could be made in PHP?
  • Idea: a global IndieWeb events calendar
  • make a drafts local website?
    • use shingling to find what is in my folder of writing that I didn't publish?
  • a local search engine with access to wikipedia, wikidata
  • “Install from the web” — a button like the iOS and Android one but for the web.
  • print a coffee sign for zoom calls
  • Trades webpage — reviewing technical writing?
  • tomorrow’s world rewatch podcast
  • what would an indieweb knowledge graph look like?
  • a site that lets you automatically create PWA installation instructions with screenshots
  • “reply openly” — a browser extension that lets you delegate a reply interface for the open web
    • fallback to email?
  • a computer without a screen, exclusively for writing?
  • a website tagging interface that is a textarea in your browser bar
  • what other browser extensions could be made?
    • “see remixes of this page” — if someone remixed a page, you could see other remixes
    • line of thinking: how can we implement primitives at the open web level (i.e. browser/HTTP/new standards) rather than at an application level? the last 30 years of the web has resulted in much innovation, but many of the innovations don’t need to be limited only to the scope of a single application / walled garden.
  • create a page with pages of github repo creation tables w/ project banners
    • one row for each project, and columns for months and years, like https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamp timetable
  • css news aggregator
  • I wish Ghost had a Sheets equivalent for creating tabular information, and a web editor
  • Web Weaving Weekly — podcast
  • blog post search engine that only searches titles?
  • HTML document search feature that lets you enter a colour (i.e. "orange") and see all pages that contain the colour
  • indie web software — a directory of software made by one person / a small group — allow submissions via github
  • “web starter pack”
  • Site map to RSS for following new websites
  • IndieWeb sticker club — a site to list IndieWeb stickers
  • Create tool to follow new GitHub repos
  • browser extension that adds an alt text button to all images with a certain width?

More ideas

  • water glasses with inspiring words or messages on the bottom, so that when you drink you see a nice note.
  • tongs for taking hot bagels out the toaster
  • HWC throwback list of notes?
  • “start a web page with me” — get ready with me, but for a web page
  • bring back the rhyming dictionary as a static website
  • Wardrobe web page, like from Clueless?
  • A gallery page with image border photo frames
  • Open Heart but for polls
  • The timed cache pattern (Wikipedia discography as an example project)
  • A url like bookmarkit.com that you can prefix onto any URL to bookmark it? Ideal for mobile.
  • Thinking of the entire web as a digital garden
  • consistency lets someone work faster — consistent navigation is easier to use; documentation written with the same structure is easier to navigate; consistent wording means resources are easier to find.
  • Search images by colour (search blog posts by colour?)
  • Search images (or blog posts) by sketch, see also artlung's post on Retrievr's Flickr sketch search tool
  • what would a website minimap look like? like in video games where there is a map in the bottom corner. the mini map could show links, next/prev blog posts, maybe other links too?
  • archiving old projects so they are still on the web — do that with coffee recipes, train station pianos? — with some kind of archived banner
  • archive banner on websites — parse pages, look for body tag, add banner; create open source repository for this. do it in PHP!
  • idea: the alto settings page as a grid of applications, ordered alphabetically
  • It could be cool to have an “offline” button that lets someone cache additional web pages
  • use cases for querying localhost:xxxx locally?
  • Update offline page to show blog posts and pages in their own lists
  • “discovery engine”
  • i wish i had a search engine that let me find useful resources without having to go through google, bing, another large provider
  • “community link graphs” — a way for each resource to build on each other; someone doing crawling; someone else doing algorithm building
    • share your link graph with a friend?
  • code web page brainstorming, like on https://jamesg.blog/code/example/
    • add line numbers
    • add raw version
    • add copy-paste button
    • allow linking to a line number / region
  • “do you have a link for that?” t-shirt
    • “i have a link for that!”
  • "You don't have a Swift-scope?"
  • A web page with images of t-shirts I have gotten from conferences

Blog posts

  • Weighing search results by word closeness
  • Saying urls; .blog has less clarity that something is a website
  • Drafts on my website
  • Your newsletter should have a web feed
  • Adding a /subscribe page
    • Indicates that my blog has a means by which you can stay up to date beyond checking in on the home page
    • I can't assume readers have / know what an RSS reader is
  • Zoom features to disable for community use
    • Closed captioning
    • Any AI features
    • Potentially chat, if a notepad is offered
  • https://nohello.net/en/ but for the word "guys"
  • inbox antipattern; avoiding read states and metrics (i.e. unread counts) in design.
  • rel=edit could also take you to the source code route for a flask app? App would need to build index.json with line numbers. Could open locally most likely using a VSCode URL.
  • rel=suggest: a link relation that describes where you can find an interface to suggest changes to a page (i.e. fix a typo, make a substantiative change, add contents to a web page)
  • Idea: Make your own RSS feed on my website. Filter by keyword, etc. Maybe my search engine would be the best way to do this? (with a back-end JSON Feed wrapper)
    • Maybe there could be a general wrapper that downloads an RSS feed and lets you filter records? — would only be useful for readers that do not support filters.
  • Web search rather than “Google search”
  • The friction of mobile coding is in how specific everything needs to be in terms of the ltters you type — there should be an advanced autocomplete for code on mobile. but then there is the question: do we even want to code on mobile? Maybe!
  • Dependency mapping for security – the exercise of drawing a personal map / make a list of how different accounts are connected.
  • Using web action handlers for editing web pages
    • What are the other use cases for web action handlers?
  • New-to-us technology makes us re-evaluate what is possible
  • Series on making browser extensions
  • CSS ch unit — how I’m using it
  • Websites as choose your own adventure
  • “tiny tools”
  • Designing a new RSS subscription browser extension
  • How the IndieAuth and OTP combination is implemented on Artemis
  • Adding padding to the bottom of a web page
  • A list of features that make a search engine more delightful
  • How my "ALT" tooltip works
  • pattern: redirects to help people find resources (https://indieweb.org/Special:ListRedirects)
  • How Artemis polls feeds
  • Redesigning the Artemis subscription flow
  • How to determine cursor position after formatting white space.
  • Transforming data from wikis
  • "documentation in chat" pattern that the IndieWeb uses to document to the wiki from the community chat
  • blank new tab page as space between websites
  • Quality of good URLs: is it bookmarkable?
  • Apple UX feature I like: the snap when cropping images
  • How to push HTML elements above liquid glass
  • Plotting the rate of database growth when thinking about service architecture
    • Related: How the Artemis database grows
  • Designing services for slow growth (i.e. Artemis, IndieWeb Discover)
    • Assumption that I want to challenge with IndieWeb Discover: that everything needs to be indexed.

Concepts

  • rel=edit
  • A standard data format for coffee provenance information
  • interactive embeddable components on my website?
  • Democratic candidates should post content exclusively on the open web; otherwise, many people will not be able to see it.
  • Reference sheets as static websites
  • The << syntax used in the IndieWeb chat to append text to a wiki page
  • limits of technology: art feels different in person.
  • “Plant-human interface”
  • it matters if someone understands a user interface
  • If you implement tools in HTML/CSS/JS, anyone can copy them onto their websites.

Design concepts

  • A home page that looks like a cafe menu?
  • URL UX: short URLs are faster to type, but being clear and the extent to which the slug is memorable is more important
  • A single colored line as a data visualization technique?

Notes

My own oblique strategies

  • look at it from a new perspective
  • How does the idea relate to {other thing you know}?
  • Drop a constraint.
  • Question a constraint.
  • Outline it.
  • Breathe.
  • Make a list.

See also

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