Do You Remember When the Internet Was Neat?
May 30, 2026 · Also published on Ko-fi
Do you remember when the internet was neat?
When you could open a browser and stumble onto weird, fun, useful, hand-made things — things people built because they wanted to share something. When apps did one thing well instead of nagging you every time you open them. When you didn't have to scroll past 2,000 words of "let me tell you about my grandmother" to get to a recipe.
It's not like that anymore. Ads, trackers, accounts, push notifications, dark patterns, upsells, "are you sure you want to leave?" nags — most apps that used to do one useful thing now exist mostly to extract your time and attention.
Cory Doctorow has a word for it: enshittification. The slow decay of platforms as they prioritize extracting from users over serving them.
I started Keep It Neat as a small series of replacement apps for things I do every day. No ads. No tracking. No nonsense. Just the actual thing.
The name's an acronym for what every app in the series promises:
N — No tracking.
No analytics. No telemetry. No third-party scripts. When data has to be stored, it's the minimum and it serves you — never sold, never shared, never used to target ads.
E — Easy.
No account required where it's avoidable. Loads fast. Works offline. The friction is yours to manage, not mine to add.
A — Ad-free.
No ads. Period. Not "ad-light." Not "ads only on the free tier." None.
T — Thoughtful.
No notifications you didn't ask for. No dark patterns. No manufactured urgency, no fake countdowns, no "we noticed you haven't visited in a while" nags. No subscriptions or upsell tiers — apps are free, or have one clear price.
What's shipped
Just the Weather — current conditions and a 7-day forecast for anywhere in the US, pulled from the NWS API. Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No framework, no build step. About 500 lines of code total. Installs as a PWA on phone or desktop. Works offline. That's it. That's the whole app.
Source on GitHub — every app is MIT-licensed and the code is public. If you want to verify any of the claims above, it's right there.
What's next
Just the Recipes is the next one — a clean recipe manager that doesn't bury the ingredients under 2,000 words of "let me tell you about my grandmother." Rails + Hotwire backend, because that's where I'm most fluent.
After that, whatever else gets bad enough that I need a replacement.
Why Ko-fi?
The principles include "free, or with a one-time clear price." Right now everything is free. Ko-fi is a way for people who find this useful to support the work without me adding tiers, subscriptions, or upsells. If that's you, thank you. If it's not, the apps are yours either way.
Coffee makes more apps.