Older projects that no longer run are left out — apart from two with a story worth telling.

1. UnitJuggler

   since 2007 Live

   Convert it, look it up, work it out.

   How far is 30 kilometres in miles, how hot is 350 °F, what is 500 dollars in euros today? Type it into a search engine and, with a little luck, you land here: every pair of units has its own page, so the answer is a click away. Forty-eight categories, daily exchange rates among them, sit beside size charts and calculators for the sums seventeen trades and hobbies keep needing, from beehives to bike gears. Or skip the search engine: the Windows app gives it a window of its own, and the Chrome extension converts on the page you are reading — select 350 °F in an American recipe and the Celsius appears right beside it. Someone I have never met once built an Android app around its frequency converter. Of everything here, the most successful page is still the one that turns kilometres into miles.

   

   

   

   

   • .NET
   • Vanilla JS
   • Fedora
   • nginx
   • Chrome extension
   • 48 categories
   • 113 calculators

   unitjuggler.com apps.microsoft.com chromewebstore.google.com
2. Skriinschott

   Live

   The screen, a window or a whole website — captured and named.

   Forty websites for a client, each wanted as a desktop and a phone would see it, top to bottom, every file named after the client — by Friday. Skriinschott sits in the corner of the screen and captures whatever you point at: a region, a window, a list that scrolls on and on. The editor adds arrows, boxes and numbered steps, and blurs whatever is nobody's business. Give it a web address, or a spreadsheet with hundreds of them, and every page comes back in full, on every device you ask for, named the way you like. The only entry on this page with no website at all — free, from the Microsoft Store.

   

   • .NET
   • WPF
   • PuppeteerSharp
   • ClosedXML
   • Windows

   apps.microsoft.com
3. Quedadita

   Live

   Invitations with no accounts, gone after the party.

   A birthday, a barbecue, a leaving do — and nobody should have to sign up for anything to come. Give the event a title and a date, and you get a page to share and a private one for the replies: one link for the guests, one for you. Date or place still open? Put a few options to a vote, and guests answer “Works”, “At a push” or “No”. Pick one of eight styles, so a child's birthday and a retirement party from the same host don't look alike. Fourteen days after the party the event deletes itself, replies and all.

   

   • .NET
   • PostgreSQL
   • EF Core
   • Fedora
   • nginx
   • no accounts

   quedadita.com
4. BroodTactics

   Live

   An ant colony of your own, dug out chamber by chamber.

   You are the queen of an ant colony: dig into the earth, build chambers — twenty-six kinds, fungus gardens among them — and give workers, foragers, soldiers and nurses their jobs. Foragers head to the surface to bring back food, while your colony grows down through five layers of soil. Come back later and everything is still there the way you left it — the colony saves itself, no account needed. Don't want to play alone? Find a supercolony to join, help it towards the weekly goal or take part in a raid.

   

   

   • .NET
   • PostgreSQL
   • EF Core
   • SignalR
   • Fedora
   • nginx
   • 26 chamber types

   broodtactics.com
5. ShowCron

   Live

   Cron schedules, in plain words.

   Somewhere a server runs “0 3 * * 0”, and nobody remembers whether that is Saturday night or Sunday morning. Fill in the five fields and the page says in one sentence what they mean, then lists the next ten times it will actually run — in whichever time zone you pick. Rather not type at all? Click the minutes, hours and weekdays together, or start from one of ten classics. Paste in a whole crontab and every line gets a sentence of its own. Nothing you enter leaves your browser — a crontab tells more about a server than anyone would like.

   

   • HTML
   • CSS
   • Vanilla JS
   • no backend

   showcron.com
6. CostDivider

   Live

   Household costs, fairly split.

   Three people share a flat, one of them earns more than the others, and it is always the same one who pays for the milk. Enter the members, sort the expenses into groups — rent, food, the car — and say who contributes what to each: a fixed amount or a share of the whole, and the split can differ from one group to the next. The site then works out who owes what, who has already paid and where the money does not add up. A group can also be shared read-only through a short link.

   

   • .NET
   • PostgreSQL
   • EF Core
   • Fedora
   • nginx

   costdivider.com
7. Hortolog

   Live

   A garden planned, planted and remembered, season by season.

   Every spring the same questions: where did the tomatoes grow last year, and is it safe to plant them out yet? Draw your beds and fill them from a catalogue of 358 plants — or skip the plan and just keep a list. The site turns each plant's sowing and harvest months into dates for your own garden, warns when a plant family comes back to a bed too soon, and mails you the afternoon before a night too cold for what is already out. It keeps the harvests, tasks and journal of every season, so one year can be held up against the next. Every plant is drawn by the site itself, from seedling to harvest, and the carrots always come out straight.

   

   

   • .NET
   • PostgreSQL
   • EF Core
   • Fedora
   • nginx
   • 358 plants

   hortolog.com
8. SpieleSammlung

   Live

   Games from the kitchen table, now in the browser.

   You fancy a game of chess, or a quiet round of solitaire, but would rather not install or sign up for anything. Pick one of seven classics — chess, solitaire, four in a row and a few more from way back — and play against the computer at the strength you choose, or open a lobby and send the link to whoever you have in mind, with a password if you want one. A lobby outlasts the game inside it: when one ends, the host picks the next and everybody stays put. Nothing is asked of you but a name, and all that is ever counted is how often each game was played.

   

   • .NET
   • PostgreSQL
   • EF Core
   • Fedora
   • nginx
   • seven games

   spielesammlung.net
9. ClassicWars

   Live

   A medieval campaign, alone or with others.

   You have half an hour and the urge to play something you don't have to learn first. Pick a realm — anything from Luxembourg's twelve cantons to the whole of Europe — choose a lord and play turn by turn: collect your income, recruit soldiers, knights and catapults, march, attack. A castle's walls triple the strength of its defenders until they are breached, which is what the catapults are for, and you aim them yourself. Rather not play the computer? Open a game and pass the link around: every player gets a minute per turn, and nobody needs an account. Lose your last castle and you are driven from the land; be the last one standing and the realm is yours.

   

   • .NET
   • PostgreSQL
   • EF Core
   • Fedora
   • nginx
   • eleven realms

   classicwars.com
10. WhereToDispose

    Live

    Where to take it and what it costs, commune by commune.

    An old sofa, a tin of paint, a broken toaster — and no idea where it is supposed to go. Type in what it is, pick your country and your commune, and the site tells you which recycling centre takes it, where that is, when it is open, what it costs and how much of it you may bring — so there are no surprises at the gate. For the things no centre takes, it lists the nationwide schemes: the shop that has to take back your old appliance, the pharmacy that takes medicines. Twenty-three countries, from Portugal to Finland, commune by commune — and every facility says where its data comes from and when it was last updated.

    

    

    • .NET
    • Fedora
    • nginx
    • 23 countries

    wheretodispose.com
11. EndlessMeeting

    Live

    What this meeting is costing.

    Six people, an hour, and nobody sure it was worth it. Say how many are in the room and roughly what an hour of their time costs, press Start, and a large counter shows what the meeting has cost so far — meant for the screen on the wall. No hourly rate to hand? A monthly salary will do. Rather not talk money? Count in person-days instead. Each agenda item can have a time budget: the page turns yellow when it is nearly used up and red once it runs out. The whole meeting sits in the link you share, so whoever joins late sees the same total as the room.

    

    • HTML
    • CSS
    • Vanilla JS
    • no backend

    endlessmeeting.com
12. CreatePasswords

    since 2005 Live

    Passwords that never leave your browser.

    You need a password — for a new account, the router, a colleague's first login — and would rather not invent one, nor have a website invent one for you and keep a copy. Choose the length, the kinds of characters and how many you want, and the passwords are made right in your browser: the page talks to no server, so nobody but you ever sees them. For every setting it tells you how strong the passwords are and how long cracking them would take. If you like, they stay blurred until you hover over them, and wipe themselves after five minutes. The old generator, it turned out, favoured a few characters — nobody noticed for twenty-one years, myself included.

    

    • HTML
    • Vanilla JS
    • Web Crypto
    • a single file

    createpasswords.com
13. start.lu

    since 2003 Live

    Everything you need every day, on one page.

    Every morning the same round: the news, the weather, the bus, the search box and the handful of links you always open. The site puts them on one page for Luxembourg: newspapers, offices, banks and shops, next to the clock, the weather, the pharmacy on duty, today's fuel prices and the next public holiday. Add your own links, with or without an account, and arrange the columns as you like. Theme pages cover one subject each, from every football club in the country to the shops that deliver here, and you can build your own. Started in 2003 with a few news feeds, and still running, in an age when nobody sets a start page any more.

    

    

    • .NET
    • PostgreSQL
    • Fedora
    • nginx

    start.lu
14. LuxStats

    2004–2008 Archived

    Website statistics without cookies, back in 2004.

    You run a small website and would like to know whether anyone comes, from where, and what they are looking for — without paying and without planting cookies on your visitors. LuxStats gave you that: a tiny image or a counter on your page, and in return graphs of visitors, referrers, search terms, countries and browsers, by hour, day, month and year. By 2008 around 500 websites had signed up, and that year it closed: no cookies, but the way it told visitors apart was legally just as much of a problem, and the lawyer's fees were more than a private site could pay.

    

    

    • PHP
    • server-drawn graphs
    • IP database

    luxstats.com web.archive.org
15. market.lu

    2004–2007 Archived

    Small ads for Luxembourg, free and with a photo.

    A car, a sofa or a flat to get rid of, and an ad that is online in five minutes and costs nothing. That was market.lu. It launched in 2004 with a note that there weren't many ads yet, so each one would be seen. A year later the most-viewed ads sat on the front page — next to a red warning about swindlers dangling inheritances and quick money. In 2007 the site was rebuilt from the ground up, and that autumn it was over. The promise that with so few ads yours would stand out all the more held for three solid years.

    

    • PHP
    • ads with photos

    market.lu web.archive.org
16. BackPing

    Live

    How much a website tracks you, graded from A to F.

    You open a website and wonder who else is watching: which companies hear about your visit, which cookies stay behind, and whether any of it starts before you have even answered the cookie banner. The BackPing extension, free for Chrome and Firefox, looks at the page you are on and grades it from A to F, with every lost point explained. Press Share and the findings go to backping.net — the site's name, never yours — where everyone's reports on a site add up to a grade of its own, and a history of how it changed. Eighteen years after LuxStats closed over how it told visitors apart, this one keeps an eye on the sites that still do.

    

    

    

    

    • .NET
    • PostgreSQL
    • EF Core
    • Fedora
    • nginx
    • Chrome extension
    • Firefox add-on

    backping.net chromewebstore.google.com addons.mozilla.org