A couple years ago I created a site called MastoGizmos, a collection of tools for exploring and searching Mastodon. One of the tools in the eleven item collection is Gift Article Gazette, an aggregator that collects articles tagged GiftArticle and GiftLink from around Mastodon and makes them available in one place. The first version of […]
The Calishat Jams of 2025: All Free, All Ad-Free
In 2025 I made 13 new tools for better search and content curation, using Google, Wikipedia, RSS, WordPress, and more. They’re all free and ad-free.
Turning Wikipedia Into a Word Game: Wiki Stack Game
Wiki Stack Game starts you off with a big handful of random words. Your objective is to add words to a Wikipedia search with the goal of making the query as long as possible while still getting results. #Wikipedia #games #WordGames
Exploring WordPress Blogs As A Series of Trails: BlogHiking.com
I wanted to search WordPress and find blogs that were more heavily covering the content I was interested in. I wanted to find a way to generate possibly-related keywords so I could build additional searches off the first one. The search offered at WordPress.com did not have all the features I was looking for, so I made my own and wrapped in a hiking metaphor. #WordPress #blogs #OSINT
Browsing and Searching Members of Congress: Congress Corral
Congress Corral lets you browse members of Congress via a number of filters and provides a page of details of useful links for each one, but lots of political directories do that. The magic happens with the four other tabs on the detail page.
#politics #LocalNews #Wikipedia
Putting Up a Rough Draft of Congress Corral
For the last week or so I’ve been working on a way to keep up with all the Members of Congress I see on TV as the government remains closed. I wanted to have a way to see all the Members in one place and catch up on them quickly. What I’ve got so far I’m calling Congress Corral.
Wikiween: Wikipedia Categories Become Spooky Cemeteries
For the last few years I’ve tried to do a #Halloween -themed #Wikipedia tool. Finally, this year, on what I think is my third try, I got something I like! Check out Wikiween.
No Kings TV Returns With Updates
No Kings TV is an easy way to browse news about the No Kings protests this weekend across 120 sources in 21 US Metro areas. Now with Mastodon hashtags!
Wiki-Guided Google Search II
Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a Wikipedia article, break it down by headings, do a word-frequency analysis on each block of text, and then click and toggle the most frequent/unusual words into a search box to build Google queries for that topic Well guess what!
RSSForager — RSS Feed Discovery Featuring WordPress
RSSForager uses WordPress to find RSS feeds with similar content to the feed or text block of your choice. Here’s how it works.