2025 was personally a lot, especially towards the end, and I will cheerfully admit to you that I turned to making things as an escape. Focusing on a problem or an idea and attacking it from all my foolish, uneducated angles takes up a lot of concentration and I’m grateful for it.

When I first started creating search tools I thought I’d run out of ideas after a certain amount of time. That doesn’t appear to be the case. The more I make, the more ideas I get. And some of the ideas really feel like they come out of nowhere! Meet up here in 365 days and we’ll look at the Calishat Jams of 2026. In the meantime, check out these thirteen tools from 2025, presented in the order they were created. They’re all web apps (except one which is a Google Sheet), they’re free to use, and they’re free of ads. I hope you find them useful.

VibesMasto: https://mastogizmos.com/vm.html

I made VibeMasto a couple of years ago but didn’t put the Web version together until last year. VibesMasto monitors Mastodon hashtags, trending links, and a news RSS feed. Everything is customizable. I like to have VibesMasto has a display on my second monitor when I’m not using it for anything else. It gives me a way to get quick news at a glance.

MiniGladys: https://megagladys.com/mg/

A couple of years ago I created a Wikipedia-based public citizen research tool called MegaGladys. MegaGladys uses a lot of Wikipedia information to find information about and relationships between people, but it’s on the complicated side and has a lot of settings. So last year I created MiniGladys, which has fewer features but is much faster and simpler to use. With MiniGladys you can get quick official links about a person, explore periods of public interest in the person, and even create keyword-based RSS feeds and find related topics.

I use MiniGladys every single day. I used to use Google for quick reference searches, to get official web sites for companies/universities or look up birthdays and such. Now I do all that via MiniGladys. It’s replaced 90% of my Google quick searches and in my opinion is faster and more reliable than whatever Google’s AI decides to pump out.

Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10dVC6gWU2QALmHhpnpTsl5keulljKhHBs8UKeWOqBFg/edit?usp=sharing

I love RSS feeds. I’ve been using them for over 25 years! But RSS can be a pain to use if your interest in a topic is only for a limited time. You have to remember to create add relevant feeds to your feed reader (I find keyword-based feeds work well for topical monitoring; you can create them with Kebberfegg) and then remember to remove them once your interest is done.

The Temporary Obsessions Feed Reader is a Google Sheet-based solution to that problem. You can set up a list of feeds you want to monitor in a spreadsheet with a start date and an end date. Every morning you’ll get an emailed list of new feed items. As you get closer to an end date you also get warnings on when the feed monitoring will expire.

To get started, go to the Google Sheet and make a copy for your own use. Then review the information in the README tab to get started and customize the sheet for your needs.

Local Search America: https://localsearchamerica.com/

Local Search America is a collection of three tools that allow you to find online information either by city/state or via zip code. The zip codes are organized by DMA (Designated Market Area) which sort of line up to metro areas but not completely. The reason I use the DMA is because it is free and makes it possible to use most zip codes instead of only ones from major cities. I would love to create a dataset of all zip codes based on metro areas but that would require time and money I do not have. Local Search America’s three tools are these:

Local News TV — Discover local news from 660 TV stations across America and their YouTube channels. Browse by state and DMA, and see the latest videos via YouTube RSS feeds. There are some basic filters for finding certain kinds of news as well.

Local Search America — Enter a US city and state to discover government agencies, TV stations, and universities in that metro area (DMA). Select up to 25 of the sites to bundle into a Google search. Works off a custom dataset of 33,642 zip codes, 12,339 government agency web sites, 1,599 TV station web sites, and about 5,969 college/university web sites.

CivicRadius Search — When you’re looking for local government web sites. Put in a city and state and a radius. CRS will find all government web sites within that radius and make them individually searchable. Doesn’t work great in places like Alexandria VA where there might be a lot of federal sites mixed in with the local.

Attention Junction: https://attentionjunction.com/

A while ago I made Gossip Machine, a tool which uses Wikipedia page view data to discover when Wikipedia topics captured public attention. Attention Junction takes that one step further, analyzing two topics to find times of public interest overlaps. After those are found, Attention Junctions gives you links to date-bounded Google and Google News searches for those topics, singular and combined so you can dig in to what happened. Lately I’ve been using it to explore news intersections between the current administration (along with ancillary characters) and Venezuela.

Tube Terrain: https://tubeterrain.com/

There is a wealth of good content on YouTube, but it’s getting increasingly hard to find amidst all the slop. It doesn’t help that YouTube’s search function is, in my opinion, terrible. Tube Terrain is one attempt to find the good content. It builds datasets of YouTube channels based on Wikipedia articles with YouTube channel Wikidata and makes them browsable. Currently there are four datasets available: one for YouTubers, one for scientists, one for activists, and one for LGBTQ people.

Wiki-Guided Google Search II (Electric Googaloo): https://searchtweaks.com/wggs2.html

As you might imagine, I made search tools first when I started building programs. Early on I created a collection of search tools that eventually became SearchTweaks.com . One of those tools was Wiki-Guided Google Search, which uses related topics across Wikipedia to build Google searches. I love the idea of using Wikipedia articles to build Google searches — there’s a lot of knowledge and context there that you don’t have, it’s just a little hard to get to in article form. With that in mind I made Wiki-Guided Google Search II, which breaks down Wikipedia articles into headings and frequent words and lets you build them into a Google search.

RSSForager: https://rssgizmos.com/rssforager.html

I made RSS Gizmos early on. It’s a collection of ten tools for finding, creating, and using RSS feeds. RSS Forager, the tenth tool, I made last year. RSSForager lets you break down an RSS feed into frequently-found words, then search those words on WordPress to find RSS feeds with similar content. It often works well, but sometimes it goes completely sideways. (I also need to change the default CBS RSS feed; I put that in there a long time ago.)

No Kings TV: https://searchtweaks.com/nkt/

No Kings is an group which helps organize protests against the current regime. I mean administration. Anyway, I wanted a way to look at news local to the protests without relying on search engine or social media algorithms, so I made No Kings TV. No Kings TV aggregates verified (by me) local news services from 21 US metro markets and allows you to view them in toto or via protest news filters. There were no recent No Kings protests but there’s enough activist activity everywhere at the moment that the protest filter will find you news. The site also has a hashtag area which monitors the #NoKings hashtag across Mastodon.

WikiWeen: https://wikitwister.com/wikiween/

I have made a few attempts at a web site which would identify dead people in Wikipedia categories and make little cemeteries for them. This year I finally got a result I liked. Wikiween has you specify a Wikipedia categories, identifies the deceased people therein, and makes a little cemetery. Clicking on a headstone will get you more information. Bats and ghosts fly around courtesy CSS. Completely useless but fun.

Congress Corral: https://congresscorral.com/

I need to update the dataset to account for recent resignations, so it’s not entirely accurate, but Congress Corral is a way to browse all the members of Congress. In addition to that, detailed information about each member of Congress includes the latest YouTube videos for that member (when available), a version of Gossip Machine that goes back to 2017, and mechanisms for searching local news and universities. There are too many members of Congress for me to keep track of them all, so I use Congress Corral for quick checkups and sometimes looking for statements via the YouTube video feed.

Blog Hiking: http://bloghiking.com/

Blogs started experiencing a resurgence last year (at least they did in my RSS feeds) as social media algorithms became worse and worse and more restricted. Unfortunately the tools that tracked and searched the blogosphere are mostly long gone (goodbye IceRocket! Goodbye Technorati!) To help find and discover blogs I created Blog Hiking, which uses a hiking metaphor to organize and explore content from WordPress. You can explore search results by year, by site, and by related concepts.

Wiki Stack Game: https://wikistackgame.com/

Wiki Stack Game came about when I was working on something else and got an idea I had to itch in my brain. You get a set of random words from a dataset (I want to replace that with something else like a words API) and have to select as many as you can that still match a Wikipedia article title. You get points depending on how unusual the words are. I’ve never considered myself any kind of game designer but this is a fun quick distraction. I haven’t decided what the best strategy is yet.

The end of 2025 was chaotic: moving to a new house and a bereavement in the family; I did very little program work in December and things are still slow-going as we grieve and settle into the new place. But I still have plenty of ideas bubbling my head and just need some time to articulate them. See you in 2027.