Best new self-hosted, design and web utility resources: 25 October

The directory additions from 25 October were thirty free tools and websites and ten open-source projects from GitHub. This roundup groups them into planning, habits and reading, learning, writing and communities, design resources, web and developer utilities, and self-hosted open-source apps. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you rely on it.

Planning, habits and reading

Milanote lays out notes, images, links, files and to-dos on flexible boards for moodboards, briefs and project plans. Its free plan has no time limit but is capped at 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads. MeisterTask is a Kanban task manager hosted in Germany, with unlimited tasks and team members on the free plan but only three projects, while automations and reports need a paid plan.

Habitify tracks routines with check-ins, reminders and progress charts; the free plan covers three habits. Time.is shows the exact time synchronised with an atomic clock, along with time zones, sunrise and sunset times and public holidays, free in the browser with ads. Libby, made by OverDrive, lets you borrow ebooks, audiobooks and magazines free with a library card, though you need a participating library and popular titles often have waiting lists.

Learning

TypingClub teaches touch typing through hundreds of short, gamified lessons and is free for individuals and schools, with ads for free users. Grid Garden teaches CSS grid in 28 short levels with no sign-up, though it covers the basics only. Codecademy's free Basic plan includes many introductory coding courses, while projects, certificates and career paths are paid. Alison offers more than 5,000 free courses supported by ads, and its official certificates cost money.

Writing, reading and communities

Smashing Magazine publishes free, in-depth articles on CSS, accessibility, UX and front-end performance, with books and workshops sold separately. Hashnode lets developers start a free blog on a hashnode.dev address or their own domain and export every post as Markdown; AI writing help needs Pro. Lobsters is a calm link aggregator for computing topics that anyone can read, but posting needs an invitation from an existing member.

The Free Software Directory, run by the Free Software Foundation, catalogues thousands of free software packages with licences and project links, in a dated wiki-style design. Emojipedia explains what each emoji means and shows how it looks on different platforms, with one-click copy and paste.

Design resources

Free Design Resources collects free fonts, mockups, templates, icons and UI kits; licences vary by item and some downloads go through third-party sites, so read each one. ManyPixels offers illustrations you can recolour and download as PNG or SVG, free for personal and commercial use, but they cannot be resold or repackaged. Cool Backgrounds generates abstract backgrounds for headers, slides and wallpapers with no account.

For developers, Boring Avatars is an MIT-licensed React library that turns names or emails into colourful SVG avatars, with a paid hosted service for teams, and DiceBear generates avatars in more than 60 styles through a free API, library or command line tool, though some styles carry their own licences. HTML Color Codes provides HEX, RGB and HSL values, charts and a picker, and WhatFontIs identifies fonts from an image, with five free identifications a day.

Web and developer utilities

Am I Responsive previews a site in four device frames at once, but it is not a substitute for testing on real devices. Browserling streams real browsers from the cloud for testing; free sessions last three minutes, and Safari and macOS need a paid plan. Wappalyzer shows the technologies behind a website, with limited free lookups and costly lead lists and API access.

Epoch Converter turns Unix timestamps into readable dates and back. Down for Everyone or Just Me checks whether a site is really offline, though it is not a monitoring service. MxToolbox runs free DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and blacklist lookups, with monitoring and alerts on paid plans. Instant Domain Search checks domain availability across more than 800 extensions as you type, and Namechk checks whether a username is free across many sites; its results can occasionally be out of date.

2FAS Auth is a free, open-source two-factor authenticator that needs no account and stores data on your device. Because it holds the codes for your sign-ins, set up its encrypted backups so you do not lose access if your phone is lost.

Self-hosted open-source apps

Most of the ten GitHub projects run on your own server, so they need some setup, often with Docker, and you are responsible for your own backups. Flatnotes saves every note as a plain Markdown file with fast search and tags. Dashy and Homepage are personal start pages for your apps and services; Dashy has a visual editor, while Homepage is configured through YAML files. Homebox tracks what you own with photos, locations, receipts and QR code labels, and Grocy manages groceries, best-before dates, meal plans and chores.

Immich backs up photos and videos from your phone to your own hardware, with albums, maps, face recognition and smart search, and it needs your own storage. Calibre-Web gives an existing Calibre ebook library a clean web interface for browsing and reading.

Three projects need no server. Fluent Reader is a desktop RSS reader for Windows, macOS and Linux that can sync with Inoreader, Feedbin and The Old Reader. VERT converts images, audio, documents and video, with most conversions running in your browser, though video conversion uses a server. Qalculate! is a desktop calculator for units, currencies, constants and equations on Windows and Linux; the Mac version needs Homebrew or MacPorts.

You can find all of these, along with every other tool and guide, in the full Best Productivity Resources directory, where you can filter by category, pricing and platform.