Intro

Following last weeks “first edition“ of neat indie projects here are some more interesting indie projects. I've discovered these projects in the last week mostly. If you got any feedback for the list or want to leave the makers behind the project a comment reply to this tweet please. Let's get started:

“TrackThis.Link“ — Mess around with analytics data

Don't like being tracked around the web? Sick off having everything tailored to look nice to you? Firefox has built something for you: TrackThis.Link — a site opening sets of sites aiming to distract the trackers. By messing with the collected data you can add a little salt to their soup. Thanks to Daniel Greenberg for building this!

Data nerds should check out “kyso“!

I'm easily excited when seeing interesting and well-presented statistics and data-sets. You could think I'm a bit a data nerd. Kyso is presenting user-submitted data sets from different sources in a visually pleasing way. Usually, these presentations contain charts and some context to analyze the data. For example, the “Product Hunt Voting Distributions“ is an interesting data set for indie hackers. It would be great if you could suggest and discuss data-sets / research ideas on a public board on the site.

By Eoin Murray, Helena Domo, and Kyle O'Shea.

“Darkmode.js“ — Darkmode as a JavaScript Library

Want to add dark-mode on your website, but can't be bothered defining (and maintaining) more CSS? You don't need to if you using a blend-mode. If you interested in the details check this blog post I've found a few weeks ago already: “Night Mode with Mix Blend Mode: Difference“.

The library is open source github.com/sandoche/Darkmode.js and can be included using a little JS snippet only.

You can see some examples on tradivegan.com, what to eat in and on the developer's website sandoche.com of course.

Getting notifications under control with “notyfy“

Notifications can be annoying, but they can also be useful to keep track of conversations and posts. Unfortunately, too many companies use notifications to pull you back onto their websites and drag you to their addictive, infinite-scroll timelines. Costing you mental bandwidth every time you just want to read a message.

Notyfy by Simon allows you to see and manage the notifications from multiple sites aggregated in one place. All information is displayed in your browser instead of another website. You can click through to the content you getting notified about. At the moment Facebook, Reddit, Gmail, StackOverflow, Medium, Quora and LinkedIn are supported. Marking notifications as read works on Facebook, Reddit, and Gmail only for now. More sites and features are in work.

Confused by all the details in Google Analytics? Check out “FlatGA“

Google Analytics is as powerful as it's confusing. Information overload from start to end with numerous charts, reports, and many tables. Especially if you are running your first website and want to learn more the overload can be challenging.

Kamban the maker has built a neat tool for exactly this case: FlatGA — a simple dashboard for Google Analytics. It started off from own pain to becoming a great tool to get a quick understanding of your visitors. The application connects to your Google Analytics and presents all information in a well-organized dashboard. No information is stored as the data is loaded from Google in real-time.

“Biscuit“-Browser: A tasty alternative

As a fan of cookies, I had to look at what this was and it turned out to be an alternative browser. Biscuit is a privacy-focused browser trying to relieve you from the flood of tabs. Under the hood, it runs Chromium as a browser-engine. The most common tools are listed in a customizable sidebar as well as over a tab menu. Definitely an interesting concept for heavy users. As it's Chromium-based a migration from Chrome should be pain-free. There are several different operating systems supported - find the Biscuit download here.

“eyetato“ — Where on my site are my users looking at?

A question many developers have asked themselves before: where do my users look at? What catches the attention of my visitors and users? By nature a tricky question to answer. It has usually been answered using eye-tracking done using a camera filming the users while interacting with your product or visiting your website.

Eyetato by Morten Just allows you to get the same information, without actually using eye-tracking software and camera. The heat-map is generated using a machine learning algorithm trained using real eye-tracking data. As it's a prediction, you should use the data carefully. Spending one minute on the demo video is definitely worth it.

Still unsure what colors to use? Check “culrs“!

We all know, there is no second chance for a first impression. Finding the right color scheme for your project is as important as having the right name. Check culrs.com if you need some inspiration for the right colors for your next side-project. Rupak Mishra and Arnob Mukherjee have curated a lot of different color schemes for you to use.

“sizzy“ — Resizing your browser during development finally has an end

sizzy by Kitze is a developer tool (in form of a browser) to allow you viewing your website in a number of resolutions at once. The times when you had to resize your browser constantly or use the mobile mode of your browser one-by-one are over.

Final thoughts 🙏️

Please help these projects with some publicity by sharing this article on Twitter or Facebook 🙏️

Raffle: Win a CSSScan license! 🤩️

Want to win a free CSSScan license? Awesome, just retweet this tweet about this blog post and you are in. I'll ruffle out a winner two days after the blog article went live (Tuesday, 8 pm Bangkok time). The winner gets one CSSScan license. I've won the license a few weeks ago and handing it over to someone else, who hopefully can by more productive using it as well 💪️

Other mentions

Cover photo by Ashwin Vaswani via Unsplash. Thank you for sharing great images!