jws.dev, over telnet

telnet.jws.dev started as a Node.js server with no dependencies that reads the same JSON API a native app would, builds every page of the site from it in memory, and serves them as numbered menus: type a number and press Enter to go deeper, B to go back, a slash and a word to search. It asks the terminal how wide it is and wraps everything to fit, draws colour and lines where the terminal can show them, and falls back to plain ASCII where it can’t.

It checks the API’s manifest on a timer and downloads only what has changed, so it never needs restarting to pick up new content. Articles from jws.news are matched against the technologies they’re tagged with, so a technology’s page can list what I’ve written about it. And because a telnet port is scanned all day, it limits how many connections each address can open and how fast.